William Blake and the Age of Revolution 0571241883, 9780571241880

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William Blake and the Age of Revolution J. Bronowski

WILLIAM BLAKE AND THE AGE OF REVOLUTION This book has for long been regarded as the outstanding account of Blake and his works. At the same time it can properly be regarded as the best introduction to Blake. First published in 1944 as William Blake, it has been out of print in this country for some years, and is now pub¬ lished in a considerably revised and cor¬ rected edition. Dr Bronowski offers an important interpretation of Blake’s art and poetry in the context of the Revolu¬ tionary period during which Blake was working. He brings to the study of Blake the powers of a mathematician-scientist as well as those of a perceptive and sensi¬ tive critic.

£2.25 net

WILLIAM BLAKE AND THE AGE OF REVOLUTION

Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2019 with funding from Kahle/Austin Foundation

https://archive.org/details/williamblakeageoOOOObron

WILLIAM BLAKE AND THE AGE OF REVOLUTION J. Bronowksi

Routledge & Kegan Paul

London

First published in Great Britain 1972 by Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd Broadway House, 68-74 Carter Lane, London EC4V 5EL Printed in Great Britain by Lowe & Brydone (Printers) Ltd, London © Julius Bronowski 1965 No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except for the quotation of brief passages in criticism ISBN 0 7100 7277 5 (c) ISBN o 7100 7278 3 (p)

CONTENTS

Introduction: The Turbulent Age The Prophetic Mask

3 21

The Seditious Writings TRADE

43

THE SEDITIOUS WRITINGS

62

The Satanic Wheels MACHINES THE SATANIC WHEELS

89 107

Innocence and Experience DISSENT

*35

INNOCENCE AND EXPERIENCE

151

The Man Without a Mask

J73

Notes

J95

Index

203

*

PLATES

1 2 3 4

5

6

7 8

9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

A page from Blake’s Notebook, including a self-portrait (Reproduced by courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum) A page from an early Prophetic Book, America, page 11 (Reproduced by courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum) A page from a late Prophetic Book, Milton, page 4 (Reproduced by courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum) The figures of Los, Enitharmon, and Ore, from The First Book of Urizen, page 19 (Reproduced by courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum) The figure of Urizen or the Ancient of Days, from Europe, Frontispiece (Reproduced by courtesy of the Whitworth Art Gallery, University of Manchester) A page from Songs of Innocence (later transferred), ‘The Little Girl Found’ (Reproduced by courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum) A page from Songs of Experience, ‘The Chimney Sweeper’ (Reproduced by courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum) Chained figures from Visions of the Daughters of Albion, Frontispiece (Reproduced by courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum) The Crucifixion (Reproduced by courtesy of the Tate Gallery, London) The Accusers, or our End is Come (Reproduced by courtesy of the Whitworth Art Gallery, University of Manchester) Hecate (Reproduced by courtesy of the Tate Gallery, London) The Wise and Foolish Virgins (Reproduced by courtesy of the Tate Gallery, London) The Ascent of the Mountain, from Dante's Purgatorio (Repro¬ duced by courtesy of the Tate Gallery, London) The Morning Stars Singing Together, from Job (Reproduced by courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum) Behemoth, from Job (Reproduced by courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum) The Simoniac Pope, from Dante's Inferno (Reproduced by courtesy of the Tate Gallery, London)

'I

INTRODUCTION:

THE TURBULENT AGE

ONE History has a malicious trick of making little of what once seemed to be great events; and history will be no kinder to the heroics of our age than of others. Yet whatever in our century history slights, it will surely respect the domination of its two great wars— two wars which together have taken ten years out of our lives, and marked us with the hidden stigmata of violence and fear. In this, our age is like the age of Napoleon, which to-day, after the eagles and the magnificence, remains in the memory as Goya savagely pictured it: twenty-two years without conscience, stamping the men and the treasure of Europe into the dirt. So time will dwarf the mechanical glories of our century, but it will not lift their tragic weight from men’s minds. The name of Napoleon walks briskly into these reflections, and we see the likeness between his wars and ours at once. Nothing that compares with the Napoleonic wars or with ours happened in the hundred years between 1815 and 1914. They were not peace¬ ful years for the empires of Europe: they spanned the Indian mutiny and the Crimean campaign, wars between France and Prus¬ sia, Russia and Japan, the South African and the Balkan wars. Yet these wars had always the air of another time: of encountering and not of shaping the daily lives of men. They do not compare with the convulsions that for a generation preceded Waterloo, and those which for a longer generation have followed the battles of Tannenberg and the Marne. They did not terrify their on¬ lookers as those who looked on at the Holy Alliance and at Munich

3

4

WILLIAM BLAKE AND THE AGE OF REVOLUTION

stepped back in terror. They did not close upon the mind and the heart with iron hoops. By contrast, from about 1760 to 1815 the minds of men were obsessed with revolution, and this gave to the struggles of that age (as of ours) the character of religious wars. We catch the tone at once in the literature of the time, and it makes the Ro¬ mantic Revival direct and close to us; we are drawn to it because we share in our lives those hopes and heart-searchings, those shifts of loyalties,' the same vacillations between principle and expedience. There is nothing like this in the earlier eighteenth century, whose Indian summer remains fixed in the solemn dog¬ gerel of Joseph Addison. And there is nothing like it later in the nineteenth century, whose Victorian calm is fixed in the gracious bombast of Alfred, Lord Tennyson. The poets who quicken our pulse and sound in our ears are those who struggled in the urgent years about 1800, because they were possessed by the same com¬ pulsions as possess us.

TWO The turbulent age from about 1760 to 1815 was shaped, of course, by the American and the French Revolutions; and it was also shaped by the Industrial Revolution. There is a unity between all three of these: the movement of industry from the village to the factory was pushed on by the same forces that made the political movements. A common restlessness runs under that time, a discon¬ tent with the traditional ways of doing and thinking, and an urge to band men together in new alliances. The age of the revolu¬ tions was powered by common aspirations in its poetry and its politics, its ideals and its inventions, and as far apart as the organ¬ ization of Napoleon’s armies and of Richard Arkwright’s factories. The massive expansion of manufacture by machines about the year 1800 obviously changed the economy of England. And, more subtly, it changed the way in which men looked at the economy and at their own place in it. So long as men worked in villages, they thought of their livelihood as a gift: a gift from God or from

INTRODUCTION

5

nature, which God or nature might bless with plenty in one year and blast with famine in another. The cottage weaver at his loom thought in this way, even though the loom made the greater part of his living for him; he thought in this way because (as Daniel Defoe insists) he still turned to his patch of garden and his rights on the common land for a critical part of his living. A slump seemed as much an Act of God to him as a drought. The village worker did not think of himself as the master of his destiny, be¬ cause his craft did not make up his whole possession. The move to the factory and the enclosure of common land changed all this. They put the worker into a different place in his economy, to which he now had only one thing to give: the labour of his hands. No longer did a superhuman dispensation stand between his work and its reward. If the society of masters rejected his handiwork, and found no use for his skill and diligence, there was something wrong with society, and not with God or with nature. It is strange to see that the spread of machines made the men who worked them conscious, first of their own work, and then of themselves as men. Yet this is what the Industrial Revolution did. It forced men in the long run to seek their destiny, and to find their station, not in the hand of God but in their own hands. In 1720, the village workers had accepted the slump that followed the South Sea Bubble as an accident of nature. In the slumps a hundred years later, the cloth-shearers and the stocking-knitters drilled on the dark moors in open mutiny against the economy that starved them. The machines changed the organization of society, and shifted the centre of a man’s life from his cottage home to the daily factory. In that shift, the man ceased to be a member of his family and his village, and in the long run became simply himself: a person. Because the machine in the factory changed the order in his life, it slowly changed the status of the worker who served it. It regimented and brutalized and starved him, it exploited him and (for a long time) his family, and it robbed him of everything but his skill. And yet, by these acts in the end it made him a man— a man alone. This is the change of conscience which links the political revolu-

6

WILLIAM BLAKE AND THE AGE OF REVOLUTION

tions to the rise of industry, and the American smallholder in 1775 to the Luddite of 1811. Here the citizens who proclaimed the Rights of Man in America and in France were at one with the tanners and the nailmakers who quoted from The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith. They spoke with different voices, but they spoke for the same cast of mind, in the homely pamphlets of Benjamin Franklin, in the educational schemes of Rousseau and Jefferson, and in the romantic poetry of Robert Burns and William Blake and Wordsworth. We catch in all of them a new sense that the dignity of man is the simple d'ignity of labour, and a new image of man the maker.

THREE Western society as we know it was made in the convulsions of the great revolutions, roughly between 1760 and 1815. In an obvious sense, the Industrial Revolution in those years forged the mechan¬ ical skeleton for our society. But it was not only the mechanics that were laid down then: the ancient orders of homage were sapped, as much in the English factory as in America and France; and as much by the self-made owner as by the factory hand. The social order had been fixed most sharply in England in the subservience of the villager to the landed gentleman. We can hear it break as sharply in 1775, when owners and workers alike openly sided with the American revolutionaries. The English opposition to King George’s war shared a common sense that in America the sturdy sons of nature were in revolt against the lords of the manor. This was not a political union; its unity grew from a new imaginative concept of the dignity of man. It was a popular move¬ ment, in the literal sense: it paid tribute to people and not to lords —not to birth, not to rank, and not to inheritance. Like the upstart men who three hundred years earlier made the Renaissance in Italy, the leaders of the revolutions cared nothing about their lineage. We are all conscious now that our society was first remade in the Renaissance; and yet we still miss the equal intellectual force in the Industrial Revolution. We have learnt from Jacob Burckhardt

INTRODUCTION

7

that the Italian Renaissance was not merely an invention in the arts. It was a watershed in history: it changed the flow of thought and action all through our civilization, in religion and daily life and politics, and most deeply in man’s conception of himself. Indeed, since Burckhardt wrote we have learnt that the Renais¬ sance ran even wider than he saw, for it also set going changes in technical skill and understanding which in time made a scientific revolution. All this we have come to see in the Renaissance because it began more than five hundred years ago. But because the Industrial Revolution began only two hundred years ago, we still miss both its sweep and its depth; we still think of it as a set of ingenious inventions and no more. We owe this misreading, of course, to the bias in our education, which has made the history books shy away from industry as a vulgar practice whose spread into civilized life they ought to ignore—as they long ignored the science in the Renaissance. It will take us time to see that the Industrial Revolu¬ tion changed the flow of thought and action throughout the West as largely and as deeply as did the Renaissance. It changed the bent of men’s minds as well as the conditions of life, in politics and in housing, in poetry and in dress, in the flamboyant monu¬ ments of the evangelical sculptors and in the inventions of the Quaker ironmasters. Most deeply, the Industrial Revolution in the long run changed man’s conception of himself. Like the Renais¬ sance, it broke the forms of a classical culture, and set about making a popular taste of its own from new beginnings. In the Renaissance, artists and cardinals and condottieri had once boasted that they were not bom in a great bed. So the power¬ ful minds of the Industrial Revolution, philosophers and in¬ ventors and captains of industry, were proud to say that they were born in a cottage. They were asserting a universal humanity, which made each man a person and a master: the master of his own fate. The Industrial Revolution, like the political revolutions which marched with it, put an end to men’s resignation to the tyranny either of men or of nature. America and France threw off their kings, and in England the machines shook off the ob¬ stinate hold of an economy in which men had long wrestled for a bare livelihood.

8

WILLIAM BLAKE AND THE AGE OF REVOLUTION

FOUR The revolutions in America and France were popular risings, in the nature of things. And it was also natural that when the risings turned into war, those who stayed to fight the long campaigns were ordinary people. This is the nature of revolutionary and reli¬ gious wars, and yet it was new in the wars of the eighteenth century; for the troops whom the revolutionaries fought were not ordinary people. The troops of that age were hired soldiers who were as remote from the affairs of their lords as the Swiss Guard is from those of the Pope. Now for the first time these professionals, who had fought parade skirmishes on behalf of their impersonal masters, stood in the field against a mob of farmers and labourers, and were defeated. When George Washington husbanded his men through the winter at Valley Forge, when Napoleon pushed his people’s army through the Alps, they did more than rout the cautious mercenaries marshalled against them. They finally destroyed the standing—and the profession—of the personal guard. The professional soldier had long been disliked in England; and yet there had clung to him an incense of admiration, a gladiator’s aura of heroism. The glory of war had always been a classical theme, and it is unexpected that it should fade from English poetry in an age of bitter war. The reason is in the bitterness: when the citizen raised his rifle, and the drilled footmen broke ranks and followed their mounted masters into exile, the heroics went out of war. At the end of the wars of revolution, there were no laurels for the heroes, and no poems. The epic poem died before 1800. By a nice irony, its place as a narrative was taken by the novel, and the word ‘hero’ came to mean not a soldier but a lover. We can date the death of the epic praise of war in England precisely. The last narrative poem of this kind was the translation by Alexander Pope of Homer’s Iliad. Pope undertook this with much fanfare in 1713, when he was a bright young man of twenty-five, who had astonished the bigwigs of London for four years. Now he offered at six guineas the set to make his subscribers patrons, not of Pope, but of culture. Homer in the Augustan man¬ ner was to be the monument of eighteenth-century England, as

INTRODUCTION

9

deliberately as the Encyclopedic, forty years later, was planned to be the monument of eighteenth-century France. What the eighteenth century called the Town took up the plan solemnly. The lords and the bishops, Bolingbroke and Atterbury; the bigwigs and the philosophers, Congreve and Berkeley; friends and enemies. Swift and Addison; dons and doctors. Young and Arbuthnot; the arts and the sciences, Wren and Newton; the wits, the belles, the politicians—all were subscribers. They were doing a serious social duty, for which Pope was the instrument; and they paid him handsomely, about £5,000 for the work. A whole society spoke for its culture in Pope’s Iliad. In fact, however, the number of subscribers was 574. Of course this number was taken from a smaller population than to-day’s. To-day there are about eight million people in Lon¬ don; in 1713, there were not six millions in England. And few of these could read, and fewer spare six gold guineas. Nevertheless, 574 men was a handful: smaller, in its setting, than the Council of Athens. And this handful of men was Augustan society: the society which was surer than Athens that it was sane, lasting, the arbiter of knowledge and taste. In that society, literary men were still close to the reins of power. The poet Matthew Prior had just negotiated peace with the French in 1711; and Pope’s most constant friend, Jonathan Swift, was the granter of state patronage for a few years. All this was turned upside down later in the century, when war was endemic and yet the epic withered. The power and the patronage died together; and instead, the poets found their following among less gentlemanly readers. They read the religious verses of William Cowper, the cottage lyrics of Robert Bums, and the homely narra¬ tive of George Crabbe. In 1800, Robert Bloomfield (who is now re¬ membered only because he influenced John Clare) wrote a poem The Farmers Boy which sold 26,000 copies in three years. About the same time, two admirers of the French Revolution, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, put forward in the preface to the Lyrical Ballads the radical doctrine that the business of the poet was ‘to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as was possible in a selection of language really used by men.’

io

WILLIAM BLAKE AND THE AGE OF REVOLUTION

FIVE William Blake is to me the poet whose work and whose life express most sensitively the moving changes of that age. He more than any other had the ambitions of simple men, spoke out of their difficult dilemmas, and suffered their neglect. His poetry and his designs belong to the Romantic Revival, and his life and his friends (as well as the men he hated) belong to the Industrial Revolution. He was a man of the new stamp, self-taught, lonely, awkward, with none of the graces of the poets of the Augustan establishment; and he broke their formal tradition to pieces. This book then is a study of one man, odd, unbending, wayward, and self-absorbed, whose mind was all visual and visionary. At the same time, because the man lived and thought so honestly, this is a book about an age: the turbulent age of William Blake. For though he was only an engraver by trade, and a poet by ambi¬ tion, he belonged to the race of the driving, rising men, John Wilkes and Joseph Priestley, John Wesley and Benjamin Franklin, who made the world over into the modem form we live in. Every¬ thing that happened then, happened to William Blake. He ex¬ pressed the hopes of the French Revolution in the lucid songs that he began in 1789. He went on writing as lucidly but bitterly against the English hatred of the Revolution at least until 1794. Only after Napoleon betrayed the Revolution, sometime towards 1800, did he finally settle into that endless monologue of fantasy about a Biblical hereafter which we call his prophetic books. In these senses, this book is a study of one man in one age. But because the man was a poet and an artist, it is in the end a study of all poetry and all art. In the work of William Blake the wars and the famines, the shifts of policies and ideals, become the agonies of all ages; and the hopes of one man become the aspirations of all mankind. What hopes he had, what quicksilver books he wrote, their headstrong amalgam of prophecy and heresy, the chapters that follow will tell. Yet there is something that should be said at the outset about the man himself. Blake has been pictured by his biographers as a forbidding and humourless patriarch, another bearded giant among the bigots and monomaniacs of his age. And

INTRODUCTION

11

Blake was indeed a man of strong loves and hates and passionate principles. But he was not thereby less human. On the contrary, he was full of lively interests, was playful and quick-witted and witty, and had a happy confidence in himself that no authority could cow. Blake always gives the sense of a mind in flower. For example, he hated what seemed to him the materialist philosophy that runs from John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Under¬ standing to David Hume. Yet when in his twenties Blake satirized their outlook (and his earnest friends who shared it), he could find a single pungent witticism for it: he called it, An Easy of Huming Understanding, by John Lookye Gent.

52

This has the punning tricks of language and the teasing sense of criticism by ridicule which have only been revived by James Joyce in our lifetime. Blake carried this bright gift into his serious work; he could always transform a solemn political commonplace into a personal quip. When James Gillray drew a cartoon (during the trial of Louis XVI in January 1793) which scoffed at Charles Fox as a foolish lover of liberty, climbing towards a waning moon with a ladder that is too short, Blake took fire at the sneer, but he did not rage at the turncoat. Instead, he simply lengthened the ladder, changed the moon over to its waxing phase, and turned Gillray’s mock into the aspiration of one of his most poignant engravings, the plate ‘I want! I want!’ in The Gates of Paradise. Indeed, Blake calmly took that collective title for his plates from the cynical inscription in Gillray’s cartoon, The Straight Gate or the way to the Patriot’s Paradise.’

SIX William Blake shared with other leaders of his age a distaste for the established ritual of the Church of England. He was a dissenter, like many of the Quakers and Unitarians whom he knew. But his form of dissent was more mystical than theirs, and derived (beyond Swedenborg) from a tradition which has been only re¬ cently and partly uncovered. It now seems likely that the roots of the religious and political dissent which Blake echoes run back into

12

WILLIAM BLAKE AND THE AGE OF REVOLUTION

the Puritan Revolution of the 1640s, when for the first time a king was beheaded in Europe, and a new army and a new society were set up by Oliver Cromwell. Several factions of Puritans had struggled for power in that earlier revolution, between 1640 and 1650. The more extreme of them were suppressed by Oliver Cromwell in 1649 and had to go underground. One such dissident faction, the Levellers led by Colonel John Lilbume, had been powerful in the army; and it also had a pacifist wing, the Diggers led by Gerrard Winstanley, who wanted to overthrow all ownership and to create God’s kingdom, the New Jerusalem, on the pattern of the Apostles. These political ideas in religious dress were preached by several eccentric sects—the Anabaptists, the Fifth Monarchy men, the Seekers, the Ranters, and the newly formed Quakers—and remained alive throughout the eighteenth and into the nineteenth century. Their influence is evident, for example, in the later sects of Shakers and Owenites in America. The men who carried on this hidden tradition used the language and the metaphors of the Old Testament as Blake uses them in his poems. For example, the secret doctrine of these mystical anarchists was called by them the Everlasting Gospel; and this is the title that Blake took for the moving and heretical verses in which in his last years he still wrote out his contempt (and theirs) for the authoritarian God of the Old Testament, and his love for Christ the rebellious child. He scorn’d Earth’s Parents, scorn’d Earth’s God, And mock’d the one & the other’s Rod; His Seventy Disciples sent Against Religion & Government: They by the Sword of Justice fell And him their Cruel Murderer tell. He left his Father’s trade to roam A wand’ring Vagrant without Home; And thus he others’ labour stole That he might live above Controll. The Publicans & Harlots he Selected for his Company And from the Adulteress turn’d away God’s righteous Law, that lost its Prey.

757

INTRODUCTION

*3 With these Gnostic heresies Blake as a young man held another strain of dissent, which now seems alien, and which indeed he gave up in his old age. This was the rationalist dissent of the Unitarian heretics, of whom Isaac Newton had been one long ago and Joseph Priestley was one now. The young Blake linked it with the under¬ ground tradition of the Diggers and the Ranters, for two reasons: a reason of the mind, and a reason of the heart. The reason of the mind is easy to read. Rationalist dissent was also radical and anti-authoritarian, in politics and in religion. The Unitarian God was one with man, and so was Blake's God. God Appears & God is Light To those poor Souls who dwell in Night, But does a Human Form Display To those who Dwell in Realms of day,

434

he wrote in Auguries of Innocence. The reason of the heart lay farther off. Blake loved the adventure of learning; to him, Christ was the wonder child and the symbol of knowledge, innocence at one with experience. He taught his young wife to read and write; and he was drawn to the rationalist dis¬ senters because they cared for education. They were not admitted to the English Universities, and had therefore had to set up their own academies. Men and women from these academies were the friends with whom Blake worked in his twenties, and on whose moral verses for children he modelled his own Songs of Innocence. For example, Blake knew in London the famous blue-stocking Mrs Letitia Barbauld, who wrote books of instruction on every topic in literature and in science. Her father had been head of the great Warrington Academy, and had brought Joseph Priestley there to teach English and modem languages, which were new subjects not taught at the Universities. At Warrington, Priestley was drawn to even newer subjects, and became so interested in electricity and in chemistry that he is now remembered chiefly for his deep dis¬ coveries in these sciences—for example, for his discovery of oxygen. Mrs Barbauld probably, and Joseph Priestley certainly, are teased by Blake in his early satire. An Island in the Moon. It is Priestley, ‘Inflammable Gass’, who challenges the other philosophers with the cry ‘Your reason—Your reason?’ which Blake turned later

14

WILLIAM BLAKE AND THE AGE OF REVOLUTION

into the name for the God of materialism, Urizen, whom he abhorred.

SEVEN I have come to William Blake as the subject of my study because his work unites the timeless with the timely, the sense of destiny with the sense of the present. Like every great poet, he had the ear which caught the whisper of the Everlasting Gospel in the every¬ day passions round him. It is the belief of great poets that the condition of man expresses eternally the same themes of love, of truth, of justice and dignity. Yet to the generation which lived through the age of Napoleon and William Pitt, of Peterloo and the Six Acts, the human condition was not an abstract play of ideals; it was experienced in famine and oppression, in poverty and neglect. This is why his age speaks so insistently to ours; for we also, the generation of Belsen and Sharpeville and Stalin’s corrupt tyranny, have learnt that man’s ideals of his own humanity have still to be fought for in every age. Of the seventy' years of Blake’s life, from 1757 to 1827, England was at war for thirty-five. From the Seven Years’ War through the American Revolution to the French wars, they became less and less the traditional skirmishes of men. They became more and more international, ideological, and ruthless. They became the economic wars of Napoleon’s Decrees and the British Orders in Council; they became total war. This is the sequence, step by step more inhuman and more mechanical, which made Blake identify his two hatreds—hatred of the dehumanized machine, and hatred of war. And Los’s Furnaces howl loud, living, self-moving, lamenting With fury & despair, & they stretch from South to North Thro’ all the Four Points, Lo! the Labourers at the Furnaces, Rintrah & Palamabron, Theotormon & Bromion, loud lab’ring With the innumerable multitudes of Golgonooza round the Anvils Of Death! But how they came forth from the Furnaces, & how long Vast & severe the anguish e’er they knew their Father, were

INTRODUCTION

*5

Long to tell; & of the iron rollers, golden axle-trees & yokes Of brass, iron chains & braces, & the gold, silver & brass, Mingled or separate, for swords, arrows, cannons, mortars, The terrible ball, the wedge, the loud sounding hammer of destruction. The sounding flail to thresh, the winnow to winnow king¬ doms, The water wheel & mill of many innumerable wheels re¬ sistless. Over the Four fold Monarchy from Earth to the Mundane Shell. Behind the outlandish names, the link between Blake’s imagina¬ tion and his violent times is evident. If it has been missed in the past, it can hardly be missed to-day. To-day the heavy sound in his books of the loom and the forge has so plain an echo in our ear that we hardly need to be told how good was Blake’s ear. It was too good. It followed the details of rebellion and repression, of industry and war so faithfully that he could not but become first unpopular, and then shunned and neglected. Blake’s indifference to his neglect by his contemporaries has been mistaken, by more worldly readers, for indifference to the world. In fact, it now becomes clear that he wrote his symbolic poems like a diary, as much about the outer world as about his inner thoughts. He put down in his prophetic books what he thought of Malthus’s theories of over-population in the same breath, and the same idiom, as his thoughts about God. Since he was an exceptionally sensitive, above all an imaginative observer, his background much of the time is simply too wide for us. Moreover, we find it hard to understand how the man who was a revolutionary until 1800 could have re¬ treated into religious resignation after 1804. How could he, who had once cursed the authority of Church and State, now protest only at the Old Testament figure of Urizen? We are no longer used to linking radicalism with religious fer¬ vour: in this, Blake was at the end of a Puritan tradition which we have lost. Yet unless we can see as one the revolutionary idealism in Blake’s politics and the Gnostic heresy in his religion, we simply do not see Blake. In his last prophetic book, Jerusalem, he still wrote.

l6

WILLIAM BLAKE AND THE AGE OF REVOLUTION

Are not Religion & Politics the Same Thing? Brotherhood is Religion. 689

And we do not see as Blake saw; we do not look with his visual mind, we do not hear with his direct and sensuous ear. Through all his poems, there sound the iron footsteps of the modem age: war, oppression, the machine, poverty and the loss of personality. They crowd the pages of his symbolic books as casually as a letter which sneers at Pitt or a marginal note which sides with Tom Paine. This is the prophetic power of Blake: that he felt the coming disasters of war, empire, and industry in his bloodstream, long before politicians and economists shivered at their shadows.

EIGHT It is over twenty years since the body of this book was written in 1942. At that time, I was working every day of the week at the tasks of destruction which war sets for a scientist. I wrote about Blake when I could, usually late at night; and what I wrote had for me then the force of a commentary on my own day—a testament of what I valued at a time when I feared that it would be destroyed. Indeed, at that time I did not expect to finish the book. Yet I was sure that I must start it; I had to record my sense of the dignity of an age, the great age of the Industrial Revolution, which had been overlooked or slighted by the historians of our culture. I wanted to speak up for a poet and his rationalist friends together, whose longings of intellect and emotion had made the modern world that I loved. Of course, I am not the first man to have a new view of Blake. The liveliest book about him is also the earliest: Alexander Gil¬ christ’s Life of William Blake, first printed in 1863. It has been ably edited by Ruthven Todd for the Everyman Library, with notes which add what has been learnt of Blake since Gilchrist wrote. Much of this new matter, and the old, has been presented by Mona Wilson in her centenary Life of William Blake. I am indebted to both these books, as well as to many other lives and commentaries. The sprightliest of the latter is again the earliest: Algernon Charles Swinburne’s William Blake, A Critical Essay, which was printed in

INTRODUCTION

*7

1868. Of books which treat Blake as a mystic, the most searching seem to me to be Denis Saurat’s Blake and Modern Thought and Milton O. Percival’s 'William Blake's Circle of Destiny. Blake’s shorter poems were first edited with scrupulous detail by John Sampson in The Poetical Works of William Blake in 1905. Since then, Blake’s complete writings—poems, prophetic books, and prose—have been magnificently edited by Geoffrey Keynes for the Nonesuch Press: first in three volumes in 1925; then in one volume without the variant readings in 1927; and most recently in a single volume with the variant readings. This last, The Complete Writings of William Blake, With all the Variant Readings, published in 1957 is a good and convenient popular edition, and I have used it to revise the text of all my quotations from Blake. The number which follows each quotation is that of the page on which the bulk of the quotation stands in this edition. When I wrote my book in 1942, Blake was regarded as an un¬ taught and remote mystic whose poems lay quite outside his times and our tradition. I showed, in his life and in his writings, that his inspiration was both more robust and more universal than this, and that his vision never missed the meaning of the tremendous years through which he lived. Since my book was first printed, this more ample view of Blake has begun to enter the textbooks, sorpetimes with and sometimes without acknowledgement. More important, the researches of others have brought new evidence of Blake’s informed, exact, and apt interest in his whole world. Among scholars who have demonstrated this are Mark Schorer in The Politics of Vision, Geoffrey Keynes in his Blake Studies, and Kathleen Raine in her continuing search into the sources of Blake’s mystic knowledge. Two books in particular have filled in the outline of my book, and I have drawn on both of them in this Introduction: one is David V. Erdman’s Blake: Prophet Against Empire, and the other is A. L. Morton’s pioneer study of the secret Puritan tradition, The Everlasting Gospel.

THE PROPHETIC MASK

X

ONE William Blake was bom on 28 November 1757; he married Cather¬ ine Sophia Boucher on 18 August 1782; and he died about six in the afternoon of 12 August 1827. We know little more of his life. A poet whose poems were unknown; a painter whose painting was disliked: he would have been glad to salvage something less than a life, a living. For Blake had not chosen to be a poet and a painter. At fourteen Blake had chosen to be an engraver; and he held to that choice until he died. He served seven years as an apprentice; he engraved for booksellers; he ran a print-shop. His friends were the men with whom he worked: the designer Thomas Stothard, the sculptor John Flaxman, the painter Henry Fuseli. They helped him to find work and patrons, and they did what little was done to make his poems and his painting known. Blake was nearly forty before he was asked to engrave the first large book of his own designs, to Edward Young’s Night Thoughts. It was printed in the slump of 1797, and failed. Thereafter Blake seldom had enough even of hackwork, and lived when he could by patronage. A second book of his designs, to Robert Blair’s The Grave, was printed in 1808; but it had been given to another to engrave. Blake held a show of his paintings through the summer of 1809. It failed. We do not know how he lived for the next ten years. The slumps had deepened; inflation and unemployment were growing unchecked;Blake was an old man who felt himself shouldered out of work. One by one he quarrelled with the fellow craftsmen who had been his friends. He was lucky after 1818 to find friends in their place. 21

22

WILLIAM BLAKE AND THE AGE OF REVOLUTION

among younger painters who happened to be religious cranks. Their leader, John Linnell, got the Royal Academy to give Blake £25 in 1822. But to keep Blake alive, he had to commission most of his work. Only thus did Blake at last salvage half a dozen years of passable comfort and dignity. He used them to make his best en¬ gravings, for The Book of Job, and his finest designs, for Dante’s Divine Comedy. Yet when Job was printed, a year before Blake died, it failed. It is a story to put its age to shame: decent, humdrum, and hope¬ less. But it is not an uncommon, it is not even a personal story. Blake lived the impersonal life of a craftsman, using his hands as he had been taught, and keeping his mind his own. The disaster was not in his gifts but in the everyday of his world; the disaster was the world. Change marched masterfully and marched violently through his world: this crippled his livelihood, and this cowed him and made him helpless. There is nothing odd in what happened to Blake; for it was happening to many thousand others. The fine London watch¬ makers were becoming hands in sweat-shops. The learned societies of the Spitalfields silk-weavers were rioting for bread. The small owners were losing their place, and their skilled workers were losing their livelihood. It is a murderous story, and it is Blake’s story. But it is not the poet’s story, nor the painter’s. It is the story of Blake the engraver. Blake had become an engraver, at a fee of fifty guineas, as he might become an advertising draughtsman to-day: because he could not affofd to become a painter. He may have hoped to work his way from craftsmanship to design. So, in the generation before his, Clarkson, the elder Catton, and John Baker had first worked as coach painters. So, in Blake’s own generation, Stothard had drawn patterns in Spitalfields; and Flaxman designed pottery for the Wedgwoods. But when Blake was apprenticed, the English painters had just won the social standing which they had long coveted; and had at once shut out the engravers. Hogarth had set his face against an English academy all his life, because he feared this rift. But Hogarth had died in 1764. In 1768 his Society of Art¬ ists, to spite its bigwigs, chose another one-time coach painter for president. The bigwigs walked out and founded the Royal Acad¬ emy, with Joshua Reynolds for president. Engravers could not be-

THE PROPHETIC MASK

23

come members of the Royal Academy. When later the Academy allowed them six lesser seats as associates, the engravers fought back by not putting up for them. This is why Blake’s bitterness, at fifty, against Reynolds’s Discourses to the Royal Academy, is aimed above all at their smugness. The Enquiry in England is not whether a Man has Talents & Genius, But whether he is Passive & Polite & a Virtuous Ass & obedient to Noblemen’s Opinions in Art & Science. If he is, he is a Good Man. If Not, he must be Starved. Liberality! we want not Liberality. We want a Fair Price & Proportionate Value & a General Demand for Art. This Whole Book was Written to Serve Political Purposes.

453

446 451

And Blake’s dislike of the classical manner of the Royal Academy was of a piece with this social anger. Blake had been apprenticed to James Basire, one of a family of craftsmen, engravers to the Society of Antiquaries. Here he learned the growing fashion, to set store by old things: among them Basire’s rather old-fashioned style. To¬ day we recall this as the fashion of a nobility gracefully mourning its decay. But the dislike of the vulgar Court which this Gothic taste spoke was not the monopoly of exquisites like Horace Wal¬ pole, privately printing Gray’s The Bard. A print of 1771, which shows Welsh counties paying homage to John Wilkes, has the verse, Thus Ancient Britons, gen’rous, bold & free, Untaught at Court to bend the supple Knee, Corruption’s Shrine with honest Pride disdain And only bow to Freedom's Patriot Train. For the newly made folk-lore of a Druid Albion had also been seized by those who fought George Ill’s Court more robustly. The Freemasons, the Ancient Family of Leeches, the small men who made Wilkes and Liberty a symbol for their discontent, took the Ancient Britons for forefathers of their brotherhoods. It was their Gothic, not Walpole’s, which Blake made his own; it had for his age the same force that primitive art has had for ours. When later, in the French wars, not long after the end of the Albion newspaper, Blake painted The Ancient Britons, he saw them

24

WILLIAM BLAKE AND THE AGE OF REVOLUTION

naked, simple, plain in their acts and manners; wiser than after-ages. They were overwhelmed by brutal arms. 577

TWO I make it plain at the outset that, in the social struggle of that time, my sympathy is with Blake. But I must make it as plain that such a sympathy cannot take the place of a judgement of Blake’s work. When we know what prompted him to do what he did; even when we find these promptings just; we have not shown that what he did was also well done. And I do not think that it was always well done. I think that Blake himself commonly made this mistake, of letting his sympathy master his judgement. A sound sympathy drew Blake to the Gothic; nevertheless, that rootless taste did him harm. For it misled Blake, who could have faced the new, to give a false prophetic worth to the fakes of Ossian and the Sublime. I Believe both Macpherson & Chattel ton, that what they say is Ancient Is so. I own myself an admirer of Ossian equally with any other Poet whatever, Rowley & Chatterton also. 783 It made Blake, one of the few English painters who had not seen the Italian paintings between which he chose with passion, also one of the few who did not know the paintings shown by Count Truchsess in 1803 for fakes. Suddenly, on the day after visiting the Truchsessian Gallery of pictures, I was again enlightened with the light I enjoyed in my youth, and which has for exactly twenty years been closed from me as by a door and by window-shutters. 852 And it is the taste in which Blake reasoned that because the sages had beards, all bearded men are sages. There is here a conflict in Blake between a strong invention and an awe for random scraps of tradition, which is common in selftaught men. It is marked in Blake’s designs: the more marked, be¬ cause they are the designs of an engraver. For though the Royal Academy shut out the engravers from snobbery, the grounds which they gave against them were reasonable. Engraving was, in large

THE PROPHETIC MASK

25

part, a mechanical craft. It did not readily make a designer, it did not make a painter, either of Hogarth or of Blake. Hogarth could not force his invention beyond the harsh mechanics of caricature, because he believed that design is merely as clear a knowledge of the figure as a man who can write freely hath of the twenty-four letters of the alphabet and their infinite combinations. These are matters of which I cannot claim to judge; I set down only my own likes. But it seems to me that Blake’s designs are written in the same engraver’s hand, and that it is at odds with the invention. The design peters out absent-mindedly in pattern; the figures are taken from standard prints and primers. The drawing is commonly flat and of surface only: the work of a man taught to make his pic¬ tures from those of others. Blake made a virtue of such impatience. To learn the Language of Art, ‘Copy for Ever’ is My Rule. 446 Natural Objects always did & now do weaken, deaden & ob¬ literate Imagination in Me. 783 But it is the vague and mechanical workmanship which weakens, deadens, and at times obliterates Blake’s great imagination. For Blake was certainly the outstanding imaginative painter of his time. Everything that he was trying to do was new and vivid. At a time when painting had become a manner and a mannerism, Blake crowded his paintings with matter. It was not wholly a painter’s matter; but neither was it a writer’s matter: it was com¬ mon to all that he did, the single and compact matter of a great imagination. And Blake knew how he wanted to put this matter. He knew that it needed a manner of its own: the sharp and sprightly outline of Michelangelo, solid but alive. Unhappily, I do not think that Blake could draw such an outline. He rightly scolded others for their puffy finish. ‘These things that you call Finish’d Lre not Even Begun.’ He justly saw that their shadowy Rubens outline was one with the vagueness and fear which haunted all their thought. But his own outline, although it is more fussy, does not seem to me more exact. Like Flaxman’s, it commonly bounds only a surface; it does not hold the volume of the great Italian draughts-men. There is a weight of space and volume in Blake’s best designs.

26

WILLIAM BLAKE AND THE AGE OF REVOLUTION

But his best designs are few. More often he frankly does not know how to build a volume; his drawing is without skeleton, in clouds and jellies; and when he tries to give his figures the air of Michel¬ angelo, the muscles with which he laces them are sham and grotesque. Blake traced the minute particulars of his vision. Without Minute Neatness of Execution The Sublime cannot Exist! Grandeur of Ideas is founded on Precision of Ideas. 457 Singular & Particular Detail is the Foundation of the Sublime. 459 But he was seldom patient enough to turn his vision to the minute particulars of draughtsmanship. I find in Blake’s manner much of the fauve: his painting has the colour, the imaginative ease, and a hint of the surface tension of Matisse. It seldom has the depth of the Italian draughtsmen after which he laboured. For Michelangelo had not laboured after the ancients. His drawings had been discoveries: the discovery of a single order, the machine, in man and in the world. Their delight is that the muscle and the joint are of a piece with the rope and the pulley: as Blake sees himself at the end of his life, ‘only bones & sinews, All strings & bobbins like a Weaver’s Loom’. But Blake the craftsman was already at odds with the machine; and knew no other discovery to order his vision. His symbols began to divide like cells, his energy to go over itself like automatic writing, in vegetable chaos. Such a mind might have been at home in the more fluid mechanics of chemistry and of biology, which were then being discovered. It is perhaps a pity that Fuseli and Blake did not do more than their one plate for Erasmus Darwin’s The Botanic Garden. Certainly their minds had no link with the static ma¬ chinery which made the Industrial Revolution. And Fuseli’s showy exercises in psychology were in flight from this machinery, no less than was Blake. Fuseli knew the conflict between vivid matter and formless manner: he confessed that he could never paint up to what he saw. And Fuseli pointed sharply to this conflict in Blake, when he said that Blake was damned good to steal from. I think that Blake mis¬ understood this conflict. He thought that printers would not use his work because it was too harsh. But Wedgwood from his Etruria Works was just spreading the taste for the clear outline which

THE PROPHETIC MASK

27

Flaxman and George Cumberland then, like Maillol and Matisse since, found apt for illustrations to Homer and Ovid. This man¬ nered but sharp taste disliked Blake for the vague and automatic, the careless, the everyday in his drawing. It disliked them more in Blake’s imagination. And Blake did let them master his imagina¬ tion, until his vision itself became a medium’s scribble.

THREE This is not a book about Blake’s designs; for I am not fitted to look at them with the pleasure and the care with which I read his writings. I do not set my judgement of Blake’s pictures against the reader’s, whether he thinks more or less highly of them than I do. I begin at the pictures only because, however we rate them, we cannot miss the strong grain of the everyday, the craftsman’s man¬ ner, the handwriting in them. It is more striking, the more visionary Blake’s pictures claim to be. It is most striking in the drawings which he made late in life for a dabbler in astrology, John Varley. For we cannot understand the inner vision throughout Blake’s work unless we understand that from the outset it was Blake’s everyday vision. All their lives Blake and his wife spoke of the dead whom they saw, not as conjured men, but as callers like the living. Blake’s younger brother Robert went about the house after 1787 as he had done before, although it happened that he had died of consumption in that year. And Milton and God, when they called, said only what Blake had long laid down as his own belief. The news which these callers brought was canny. After dinner I ask’d Isaiah to favour the world with his lost works; he said— 154 Well, what would you have said in his place? He said none of equal value was lost.

154

The answer could not be bettered: 'Ezekiel said the same of his.’ Blake’s visions came in no heightened mood, but are his everyday moods. He looked at them with the insight with which he had looked at the face of the engraver William Wynne Ryland, when

28

WILLIAM BLAKE AND THE AGE OF REVOLUTION

his father had wanted to apprentice him to Ryland. He wrote of them with the energy, and with the extravagance, with which he had said of that face ‘it looks as if he will live to be hanged’. Ryland was hanged in 1783, for forging bills of exchange. It may have been this story which made Blake all his life write Tyburn for a symbol of law and horror: Ryland’s was the last hanging at that place, which is still marked at Marble Arch. But the story is not one of second sight but of insight. When Blake was taken to Ryland, some time in 1771, Ryland was at the end of his spendthrift years and his grand manner, and knew it; he was bankrupt before the end of the year. What Blake read in such a face, at such a time, was not a fate but a man. Every honest man is a Prophet; he utters his opinion both of private & public matters. Thus: If you go on So, the result is So. He never says, such a thing shall happen let you do what you will. 392 Nor did this insight work in Blake without error. It read forgery as a hanging crime in the face of Ryland. It failed to read murder in the face, debonair as Ryland’s, of a man who befriended Blake late in life: Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, gossip, critic, painter, and poisoner. To be sure, Wainewright was only transported. And as in his vision, so in his writings, Blake’s prophetic gift is his everyday gift. Only so is it apt to give to his symbolic writings the name, the prophetic books; and then only because Blake himself fixed its workaday meaning. ‘Every honest man is a Prophet; he utters his opinion both of private & public matters.’ The symbolic manner of these books is large and rhetorical. But take it up any¬ where; hold it at its most moving— How shall I flee, how shall I flee into the bower of Los? My feet are turned backward & my footsteps slide in clay:

335

it begins in the world which we know. The hint for this fine evan¬ gelical image comes from the hymns of Cowper; but we know precisely where Blake first wrote it. It was in a letter to his London patron Thomas Butts, when Blake was at Felpham in 1802. I am not ashamed, afraid, or averse to tell you what Ought to be Told: That I am under the direction of Messengers from

THE PROPHETIC MASK

29

Heaven, Daily & Nightly; but the nature of such things is not, as some suppose, without trouble or care. Temptations are on the right hand & left; behind, the sea of time & space roars & follows swiftly; he who keeps not right onward is lost, & if our footsteps slide in clay, how can we do otherwise than fear & tremble? 812 To tum this into two lines of verse, Blake first transliterated it in eighty lines of constructed vision, which he sent to Butts later in the year. Painstakingly he there roared Los and Enitharmon—for 'Los is by mortals nam’d Time, Enitharmon is nam’d Space’— where once the sea of time and space had roared and followed swiftly. Prose, vision, and prophetic verse seem to speak of a less worldly life than ours. But turn to the beginning of the sounding passage which I have quoted: My unhappiness has arisen from a source which, if explor’d too narrowly, might hurt my pecuniary circumstances, As my dependence is on Engraving at present, & particularly on the Engravings I have in hand for Mr H.: & I find on all hands great objections to my doing anything but the meer drudgery of business, & intimations that if I do not confine myself to this, I shall not live; this has always pursu’d me. You will un¬ derstand by this the source of all my uneasiness. This from Johnson & Fuseli brought me down here, & this from Mr H. will bring me back again; for that I cannot live without doing mv duty to lay up treasures in heaven is Certain & Deter¬ mined. 812 Prose, vision, and prophetic verse are parts of a forthright debate, whether it is better to live at Felpham under Mr Hayley by engrav¬ ing, or to starve alone in designing. And all come to the same choice: 'a determination which we have lately made, namely To leave This Place’.

FOUR What is true of the matter of Blake’s prophetic writings is true of their manner. The simplest comment on the other-worldly language of the letter from which I have quoted is Blake’s own. Writing its debate more plainly to his older brother James, he added,

3o

WILLIAM BLAKE AND THE AGE OF REVOLUTION

This is the uneasiness I spoke of to Mr Butts, but I did not tell him so plain & wish you to keep it a secret & to burn this letter because it speaks so plain. 819

| I

We mistake the language, and we mistake the meanings, of Blake’s prophetic books, if we forget the reasons which made Blake choose and change that language. Blake chose his prophetic symbols be¬ cause he found them apt to what he was saying; but he changed their meanings, as the reasons for their aptness changed. Nothing has hindered the understanding of Blake’s prophetic books so much as the wish to fix their symbols singly and steadily. These symbols shift only within a well-marked framework: nevertheless, they do shift, and they shift in order to remain apt to whatever actual Blake then had in mind. The symbol of Los shifts from one of time to one of energy, even within the narrow contexts from which I have been quoting; and Satan changes completely. This proliferation of meanings, unfolding from one stem, is an orator’s trick. And from the outset we must leam to read Blake’s prophetic manner, not as poetry, but as rhetoric. This is the harder, because Blake also wrote poems; and most readers will feel as I do, that his poems are more moving than his prophetic books. The feeling is the mark of our common understanding, that Blake did not write the two alike. But we must also understand that he was not trying to write them alike. He was not trying to fix the sultry symbolism of his prophetic books as he fixed the glass-clear images of his poems. He was not trying to write the quick, lively, lifting rhythms of his poems into his prophetic books. Blake was a bold and sensitive inventor of rhythms all his life; all his life he wrote poems and prophetic books together; yet he never took the slack rhythms and the loose phrasing, which he also invented, outside his prophetic books. He held them to their place, because only in that place did they fulfil their purpose. Why stand we here trembling around Calling on God for help, and not ourselves, in whom God dwells. Stretching a hand to save the falling Man? are we not Four Beholding Albion upon the Precipice ready to fall into NonEntity?

672

THE PROPHETIC MASK

31

All you my Friends & Brothers, all you my beloved Com¬ panions, Have you also caught the infection of Sin & stem Re¬ pentance? I see Disease arise upon you! yet speak to me and give Me some comfort! why do you all stand silent? 673 Of course these lines, with their marked hortative rhythm and pur¬ pose, come from a prophetic book. And they come from a book whose orator’s manner Blake avowed, Jerusalem. When this Verse was first dictated to me, I consider’d a Monotonous Cadence, like that used by Milton & Shakspeare & all writers of English Blank Verse, derived from the modem bondage of Rhyming, to be a necessary and indispensible part of Verse. But I soon found that in the mouth of a true Orator such monotony was not only awkward, but as much a bondage as rhyme itself. 621 But Blake, like Dryden before him, found rhyme a bondage only when he was writing rhetoric. Rhetoric is an extravagant manner; but it remains a manner of the everyday. It uses imagery to give to everyday speech, not depth and not precision, but energy. And energy becomes the keyword to Blake’s prophetic books: ‘Energy is Eternal Delight.’ The same preface To the Public from which I have quoted, set before Jeru¬ salem, underlines the everyday and the energetic in the book. I pretend not to holiness: yet I pretend to love, to see, to converse with daily as man with man, & the more to have an interest in the Friend of Sinners. Therefore, [dear] Reader, [forgive] what you do not approve, & [love] me for this ener¬ getic exertion of my talent. 621 These words are also Blake’s answer to those who seek in his prophetic books only the secret system. They show that Blake himself knew that, at bottom, his symbolism is held together only by his energy and his imaginative insight. For Blake was not trying to puzzle out a secret or a system. He was trying to make men give up systems, rationalist and religious alike. And he was trying ‘to converse with daily as man with man’.

32

WILLIAM BLAKE AND THE AGE OF REVOLUTION

FIVE I do not wish to belittle those who have found Blake’s mysticism more absorbing than they have found Blake. Of course there have been cranks, in Blake’s lifetime and since, who have merely forced their own system into Blake; but that temper is not the monopoly of mystics. There have been painstaking readers who have traced Blake’s symbols to Swedenborg, to Boehme, to the Gnostics, and to the Cabbala; and we are indebted to them. I myself, whose reading in these matters does not go beyond the Bible and some Jewish mystics, have been astonished to find how readily he took over any symbol which he found vaguely to his purpose. Blake’s largest source seems to me to have been Revelation, alike for such prose as his notes to Watson’s Apology for the Bible and such verse as The Book of Urizen. And there is a welter of symbols in Blake which goes back, by whatever steps, to the Cabbala: his Four States, his Trees, his Spectre and Emanation, his Divine Image, his Seven Eyes, his 'Jerusalom jn every Man’. The Cabbala has a hint of Blake’s strikingly modem dialectic of Contraries and Progression. It has the geography of his Milton. Even the oddly closed geometry of Blake’s world may be that of the Cabbalistic spheres, if I understand them rightly; and is kin to the Gnostic spiral which Blake drew in Jacob’s Ladder, and to such symbols as the snake¬ ring. We can certainly enlarge this list a hundredfold; we can show that its sources are ten times as many, and ten times more scattered. Yet we shall then have shown, more certainly, that these formal likenesses tell us little of Blake’s thought. For the more symbols we find Blake to have picked up, and the more random their sources, the plainer it becomes that he took them less by choice than from habit. All these symbols were alike to Blake, because all were to him shadows of the same mystery. The mystery is that the one and the many are parts, each of the other; that in the beginning is the end, and that the centre meets the circumference. To hold together two such poles, in whatever form—the subject with the object, the ego with the id, man with society—this is the oneness for which the mystic strives. But just this is the aim, not of one mystic, but of all.

THE PROPHETIC MASK

33

All Blake s symbols link the one with the many, inside with outside, the face with the mask. All Blake’s thought then sets itself the mystic s aim; but we have still to ask, How does it reach its aim? We have still to look at his symbols, not for what they have in common with those of all mystics, but for what they do not. There is no doubt what makes Blake’s mysticism uncommon: alone among such other-worldly thinkers, he founded it on a harsh understanding of the actual. Blake made a symbolism of his own in giving to the states of man the names of cities. But the reader who wants to map these states must understand the worldly meaning of each name. Benevolent Bath, Bath who is Legions; he is the Seventh, the physician and The poisoner, the best and worst in Heaven and Hell. 668 The double symbol here, and the joining of the inner and outer spheres: these are the commonplaces of mysticism. There is one thing which is uncommon; and it is the one thing which Blake put there by choice: the name Bath. Only the vivid, shrewd mind of Blake could have made eighteenth-century Bath, place of healing and of corruption at once, a symbol in the timeless dualism of the mystic. There is a history to every name in Blake’s lists. In Tyre & Sidon I saw Baal & Ashtaroth: In Moab Chemosh: In Ammon Molech, loud his Furnaces rage among the Wheels Of Og, & pealing loud the cries of the Victims of Fire, And pale his Priestesses infolded in Veils of Pestilence border’d With War, Woven in Looms of Tyre & Sidon by beautiful Ashtaroth: ' In Palestine Dagon, Sea Monster, worship’d o’er the Sea: Thammuz in Lebanon & Rimmon in Damascus curtain’d: Osiris, Isis, Orus in Egypt, dark their Tabernacles on Nile Floating with solemn songs & on the Lakes of Egypt nightly With pomp even till morning break & Osiris appear in the sky: But Belial of Sodom & Gomorrha, obscure Demon of Bribes And secret Assasinations, not worship’d nor ador’d, but With a finger on the lips & the back turn’d to the light:

34

WILLIAM BLAKE AND THE AGE OF REVOLUTION

And Saturn, Jove & Rhea of the Isles of the Sea remote. These Twelve Gods are the Twelve Spectre Sons of the Druid Albion. 528 But the history of these names is not to be found in books of com¬ parative religion. The reader who thumbs after these gods will find it hard to count them so as to make just twelve; and he will find little else. The list comes alive only in its lightning rhetorical images, each seen with fresh insight and each charged with fresh hatred. Blake lingered on three of these images: why these three? Why had Blake come to hear in the spectral Albion the manburning furnaces of Moloch and the looms of Tyre and Sidon weaving war? Why did he come back with tender loathing, here and elsewhere, to the poisoned Cleopatra image of Egypt, its ‘night of delicious songs’, ‘the night of prosperity & wantonness’? And most swiftly seen, most frighteningly held of all: why did Blake mark in his Albion the figure of the spy and censor, the agent provocateur? Belial of Sodom & Gomorrha, obscure Demon of Bribes And secret Assasinations, not worship’d nor ador’d, but With a finger on the lips & the back turn’d to the light. 528 These questions take us to the base of Blake’s thought. In their answer lies the understanding, not of these fifteen lines alone, but of Blake’s prophetic books. This is to look beyond their system, the formal grammar of Blake’s thought, into its language.

SIX Of course, the largest puzzles in Blake have always been the puzzles of his shifting language. When Blake from Felpham called Butts the ‘Dear Friend of My Angels’, Butts answered, I cannot immediately determine whether or no I am dignified by the Title you have graciously conferred on me. You cannot but recollect the difficulties that have unceasingly arisen to prevent my discerning whether your Angels are black, white, or grey.

THE PROPHETIC MASK

35

This is heavy fun, but it is shrewd fun. And it is the ground on which good readers of the time, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Lamb, found Blake maddening and called him mad. It is the ground on which Blake’s own friends thought him wilfully awkward. They did not doubt the great sweep of his thought; Wordsworth did not miss that when he found ‘something in the madness of this man which interests me more than the sanity of Lord Byron and Walter Scott’. And they did not doubt that Blake spoke what he thought. But they doubted whether his language, however like theirs, was the same as theirs. And unless Blake spoke their language, could he speak to them? Unless he hit the pitch of their ear, could he be said even to be thinking aloud? Were Blake’s writings less aimless than those vast harangues, ten, twelve, sixteen hours together, in which George Ill’s porphyria foamed into madness in 1788? Such puzzles, however, were not set by Blake alone. Chatterton and Wordsworth also strained against their readers’ language; and Cowper and John Clare went mad. The rhetoric of the Wesleyan revival and of Burke became formless in hysteria. The oddities of Blake, in word and act, belong to this larger context. Certainly the men who thought Blake mad were wrong; but they were not silly. Each kind of madness is a distortion of privacy, at its boundary with the social world. The privacy of the mad may collapse inward like Cowper’s, or explode outward like Burke’s; but it does so under the strain of that world. The men of Blake’s day felt the strain in him, because they feared it in themselves. William Wordsworth held it anxiously within his language, until all thought withered in him. But Dorothy Wordsworth went mad. Blake knew what discontent made him and others pit their language against the world’s, and drove them to madness ‘as a refuge from unbelief. There are States in which all Visionary Men are accounted Mad Men; such are Greece & Rome: Such is Empire or Tax. 777 The men of Blake’s day who called him mad were less glib than others who have since called him sane. For they did not miss the larger context of his discontent. The context of that age of rhetoric and madness is now less well known than is Blake. It is ironic that it is easier to fix, say George

36

WILLIAM BLAKE AND THE AGE OF REVOLUTION

Crabbe and William Wilberforce, by taking bearings from Blake, than to fix Blake from them. Nevertheless, the aim to which I have held in what follows is the understanding of Blake alone. Because his context is large, I have had to be painstaking. I ask the patience of those readers who are as precise as I have tried to be with the American war, the French Revolution and wars, and the towering background of the Industrial Revolution. Blake did not merely live through these: he lived them, in his own impersonal life; and he lived them into his prophetic books. The life of Blake, and his thought, are not to be coaxed from the few letters which he wrote from Felpham to his London friends, and from London while he still had friends at Felpham. They are there, for all to read, in the history of his time; in the names of Pitt, of Paine, and of Napoleon; in the hopes of rationalists, and in the despair of craftsmen. Until we know these, we shall not understand Blake’s poems, we shall not understand his thought, because we shall not speak his lan¬ guage. Yet when we speak Blake’s language, shall we needs understand his meaning? Is it apt, in reading Blake’s poems, to give them a meaning? For, is there a meaning to give? A. E. Housman, who put Blake higher among poets than I do, held that Blake’s meaning is often unimportant or virtually non¬ existent, so that we can listen with all our hearing to his celestial tune. I take it that Housman was not saying that Blake himself wrote without a meaning. For, however sagely critics say that poems are made of sounds and rhythms, poets robustly go on making them of words; and can no more speak the word without its meaning than without its sound. Certainly poems make uncommonly much of their tune. Certainly, if you choose to think of other arts, poems are made with words as pictures are painted with colours. But pictures are painted with colours: they do not paint colours. They paint surfaces and volumes, they order shapes and masses, they use the knowledge of what colours do to make a meaning. So sound, rhythm, tune, words in the poem make a meaning; so these in each of his poems make a meaning for the poet’s whole work; and the work in turn enriches each of its parts. I hope that

THE PROPHETIC MASK

37

this book leaves no doubt that Blake put a meaning into his life’s work. What I take Housman to have been pointing to is the thin privacy, the glimpse of madness in Blake’s poems, which make it seem easy to read them without a meaning. Unhappily, it is no easier to read than to write without a meaning; and the reader who does not catch Blake’s meaning has commonly already put in his own. There is a poem in A Shropshire Lad which begins, Farewell to barn and stack and tree, Farewell to Severn shore. Terence, look your last at me, For I come home no more. The sun burns on the half-mown hill. By now the blood is dried; And Maurice amongst the hay lies still And my knife is in his side. My mother thinks us long away; ’Tis time the field were mown. She had two sons at rising day, To-night she’ll be alone. I think that when Housman wrote this poem, his mind unawares was touched off by an image from Blake: The brother & the brother bathe in blood upon the Severn, The Maiden weeping by. The father & the mother with The Maiden’s father & her mother fainting over the body, And the Young Man, the Murderer, fleeing over the mountains. 281 If I am right, Housman’s poem shows that he read his own outlook into Blake: in what he left out, no less than in what he took. Blake’s poems can be read with very simple meanings. It shows the depth of Blake’s mind that, though he did not think of them so, they can be so read. And the reader who wants to come back at last to Blake’s poems, as I do, is right to ask, Will all this stumbling over Pitt and the prophetic books enrich the meaning? He is right to ask what knowledge and what pleasure he will gain,

38

WILLIAM BLAKE AND THE AGE OF REVOLUTION

at such pains, to enlarge the pleasures of sound, of rhythm, and of tune, the simple happiness and sadness, the springing pattern and the conjured moods, which are uppermost in Blake’s poems. But he must beware of asking only because he wishes to hold to his own meanings. He must beware of choosing his own meanings in place of Blake’s, merely because he knows his to be less search¬ ing. There is no doubt that Blake’s poems meant more to him than they can do to any one of his readers. There is no doubt that they held for him compactly the meanings for which he fumbled in the rhetoric of the prophetic books. We need not ask, therefore, whether the prophetic books are apt to Blake’s poems. They are. But we may ask whether they are apt enough to repay these pains.

SEVEN The most forthright answer to this question is that which Swin¬ burne gave. Wliat is true of all poets and artists worth judging is espe¬ cially true of him: that critics who attempt to judge him piecemeal do not in effect judge him at all, but some one quite different from him, and some one (to any serious student) probably more inexplicable than the real man.

The word which I would stress here is ‘inexplicable’. For surely the reader of Blake’s poems must ask himself, why Blake did not write his prophetic books like them. Why is the imagery of the prophetic books smoky and violent where that of the poems is lucid? Why is the language of the prophetic books fluid and secre¬ tive, commonplace yet wilful, when the poems speak with open face? Why did that poetic face, The Divine Image, choose to put on its prophetic mask? These questions have hardly been put. So many have asked, How? of the prophetic books, that few have asked the blunter question, Why? This, however, is my question. And this has taken me away from the source books, to the living sources of Blake’s language. It is a long journey for one like myself, who finds the worth of Blake at. last in his poems. But it is the journey of Blake’s own Traveller; and like him, I know at the end that the

THE PROPHETIC MASK

39

beginning has been enriched by it. Having tried to understand the whole of Blake, I have found it shining back into every part. This is my belief, and I hope to make it the reader’s. It was certainly Blake’s belief. But no such understanding works of itself. When we have leamt Blake’s language, we have still to judge what he said with it. When we have stripped the mask, we have still to judge the face; and it is an act of judgement, even to find them one. What follows is not written because it makes judgement needless, but because without it judgement is helpless. The world in which Blake lived stands stark in the Songs of Experience; but it did not of itself make the Songs of Experience; and it certainly does not make them good or bad. Yet that world may have made the Songs of Experi¬ ence less round than the Songs of Innocence. Perhaps such a book as this tells us about the things which Blake did greatly, only that they were not burdened by the misery which made him do other things ill. It is not a judgement of what is great, and it does not tell us how the great is made. It tells us how a world can cripple what should have been great.

THE SEDITIOUS WRITINGS

Trade

ONE The year 1757, in which Blake was bom, was a year of dearth. So scarce was com that Parliament forbade its use in the making of spirits. Such an act had not been spoken of for a hundred years and more. For a hundred years and more, England had commonly grown more corn than she used; and for most of this time, Governments had paid a bounty for its export. But from 1757, throughout Blake’s life, the years of dearth grew common. In 1795 the younger Pitt was trying to eke out a war budget by taxing those who powdered their hair a guinea a head. But that-year flour was so scarce that he had to forbid its use in hair-powder. The four-pound loaf had cost 3d. before the dearths; in 1801 it reached the famine price of is. 10d. When Blake died, in 1827, landowners no longer pressed for a bounty on the export of com. They had carried the Corn Laws against a rioting country a dozen years before Blake’s death, and they held to them for nearly twenty years after it. But these laws took protection no farther than to restrict the import of com. England then ceased to grow enough com for her needs during Blake’s lifetime. It is one of a web of changes, no single one of them cause and no one of them effect, whose strands cross over and over these seventy years. It is certainly linked with the growth of population; with thirty-five years of war, piracy, and blockade; with mounting debts, taxes, and poor-rates; with the rise in prices, and with economic let be. And these in turn are linked with the enlargement of factory industry and of finished exports; with the 43

44

WILLIAM BLAKE AND THE AGE OF REVOLUTION

enclosure of common land; with the decay of smallholders and craftsmen, and the use of unskilled workers; with shifts in political power and loyalty, and with a changing social outlook. This is the web, bewildering in detail and overwhelming in the large, which goes by the name of the Industrial Revolution. The industrial changes, which this name underlines, were indeed the most far-reaching of all: they were a revolution. But we must read the name strictly; this was an industrial revolution: it did not revolutionize England, but industry. The revolution came to an England whose wealth was made in cottages, and it moved the sources of wealth to factories. But the wealth throughout was founded in a simple machine industry. At bottom, the revolution was no more than a powerful way of drawing this industry to¬ gether. England did not become an industrial country at the end of the eighteenth century; for she was an industrial country long before. When Blake was bom, her exports had already reached £15,000,000 a year, having doubled since the beginning of the century. The Industrial Revolution could not quite treble this sum before the century ended. And a hundred years before Blake, England had been enlarging her export trade by very modern means. She had provoked war against Holland in 1665, designedly in order to ruin the Dutch trade with Africa. Nevertheless the Industrial Revolution did end an age. At its birth, and Blake’s, there died an order of society as well as of industry. The age of the Whigs, that Indian summer of village industry, was ended. It had been the last age built on England's age-old monopoly: the great range of her wools, and the crafts of working them all. The woollen cloth had been a treasure more plentiful than gold, and as marketable and current the world over. With this had been paid the larger world trade which, for a hundred years before Blake was bom, had been making England greater than the empires of Spain and France, and richer than the carrying trade of Holland. England’s empire was begun on the bottom of village industry; on this rested her liberal dissenters, her society of moneyed men, her great Whig houses. And the staple of this industry held its own for some time still. To the end of the eighteenth century, the woollen cloth made up onethird of England’s exports, and of her whole output. But cotton,

THE SEDITIOUS WRITINGS

45

the new staple of factory industry, was gaining fast; and overtook wool as soon as the century turned. Thirty years before Blake was bom, Defoe had held up the weavers of the West' Riding wool country as the models of industry, and the pride of society. But before Blake died, a Parliamentary Committee found that handloom weavers of cotton were earning 6s. 4d. a week. The bottom had gone from village industry..

TWO The masters of village industry had not been owners but merchants. These merchants had long been putting out their own raw stuffs to be worked. And they had begun to take the craftsman’s tools in pawn, before Blake was born. Yet it is fair to think of the village worker of that age as commonly owning his tools, and as often own¬ ing his raw stuffs, at least in law. He made hats and watches, linen and small-arms, he made silk in Spitalfields and stockings in Not¬ tingham, Manchester cotton pieces and Birmingham nails: and he still made them largely at his own risk. Cloth was still made by men whose capital was a loom and perhaps a week’s wool, and whose labour was their own and their families’. Some of these men still took cloth to market, and some great clothiers still bought it there; in law at least, the men bought another week’s wool, and went back to their weaving. Growing richer, such men might-buy two or three looms, and hire hands to work them; they might put out wool to be spun in other villages; but they remained well-to-do master workmen, the men whose praise fills Defoe; and they seldom became clothiers. And factory industry did not begin from the growth of these men, but from their mortgaging step by step to the merchant adventurers or their middlemen. Where a factory industry had been set up earlier, as in the West Country, it was in fact falling into decay. Village industry was thus the base for a society of trade, paid in ready money. At bottom the changes through which Blake lived were from village to factory industry; at the top they were from a society of money to one of capital. Money was invested before Blake was born; but it was seldom invested as industrial capital; because there were few industries whose plant was large enough

46

WILLIAM BLAKE AND THE AGE OF REVOLUTION

to need share capital. There were a few such industries: mining, shipbuilding, the making of glass and metals; and the adventurers in these had early formed some kinds of joint-stock companies. But outside these few, there was no industrial plant; and jointstock companies and share capital were almost unknown. When Blake was born there was a money market for trade; there were banks and insurance companies; but trade was the buying and selling, not the making of goods. Only in Blake’s lifetime did the merchants fall back before the new masters of factory industry: Arkwright and Wilkinson, the Peels and the Wedgwoods. And men who lived through the change, men in Government as well as men in the street, hardly understood that it was a change. They went on thinking of the rich of their society as traders who had merely strayed into industry. Blake saw more deeply than others into the ways of industrial combination and monopoly. But to the end of his life he spoke of them as ‘the Arts of Trading Com¬ bination’ and the interest of the Monopolizing Trader who Manufactures Art by the Hands of Ignorant Journeymen till at length Christian Charity is held out as a Motive to encourage a Blockhead, & he is Counted the Greatest Genius who can sell a Good-for-Nothing Commodity for a Great Price. 595 What word but Trader could Blake use, at a time when the name Manufacturer was still given, literally, to the handworker, as com¬ monly as to the employer of factory hands? The merchant of the Whig age had, of course, ranged far beyond the trade in English manufactures. This trade had given him money, ships, and power; and had thus given him the means to trade in the goods of all countries. He had used these means to build a world trade, above all in the raw stuffs of America and the manufactures of India. Bristol and Liverpool had grown great by this trade, long before the Shropshire ironmasters and the Lancashire drapers became the masters of English industry. But whether the goods which the merchant shipped were English or foreign, his was a short-term money speculation, not a long-term capital investment. He gambled against the hazards of war, piracy, and shipwreck; and since he smuggled quite half his goods, he

THE SEDITIOUS WRITINGS

47

gambled against those Customs officers whom he did not buy. And he looked for the dividends of the gambler rather than the in¬ vestor.

THREE The gaming-house, the race-course, the underwriter’s office, and the market in trading stocks all grew up in the moneyed society of the early eighteenth century. The lottery became the common means of raising public money, for taxes, for the building of West¬ minster Bridge, for the founding of the British Museum. John Gay, who was too proud to take the sinecure of Gentleman Usher to a princess, was not ashamed to hold that of Commissioner of the State Lottery. Men so prim as Addison, and so rich as Fox’s father, won large lottery prizes. For a merchant society risks its money without the backing which industrial plant gives, and makes it with¬ out the checks which that sets. It gambles for its livelihood without squeamishness: in trade, in money, in patronage, and in bribery. The tongue-tied unhappiness which falls on Blake when¬ ever he speaks of money shows the striking change which the Industrial Revolution worked here. Edward Young had thought it no shame to write to a Whig Prime Minister in 1726, My breast, O Walpole, glows with grateful fire. The streams of royal bounty, turn’d by thee, Refresh the dry domains of poesy. Put this beside the embarrassment with which Blake in 1804 asks Hayley to pay him for his work: I must now tell my wants, & beg the favour of some more of the needful: 851 we are in another society. The men of Young’s society fought for their money as frankly as they begged. They had begun the Whig age in 1688 by turning out James II, and making William III king; and they set them¬ selves to make money a Whig monopoly. They founded the Bank of England, and the Tory squires failed to found a land bank against it. They founded a new East India Company, and the

WILLIAM BLAKE AND THE AGE OF REVOLUTION

48

Tory squires failed to hold the older company against them. A Tory Government in 1711 had challenged them, by floating a loan conversion through the South Sea Company, which it fourded for that end. But when this company in 1720 tried spectacularly to comer the money market, the Bank and the East India Com¬ pany broke it. Thereafter, the City and the great Whig houses, the Percys, the Cavendishes, the Russells, the Howards, ruled unchallenged. Swift might go on pouring out his bitter dignity, that he abominated that scheme of politics (now about thirty years old) of setting up a moneyed interest in opposition to the landed. It is the Folly of too many, to mistake the Eccho of a London Coffee-house for the Voice of the Kingdom. The City Coffee¬ houses have been for some Years filled with People, whose Fortunes depend upon the Bank, East-India, or some other Stock: Every new Fund to these, is like a new Mortgage to an Usurer, whose Compassion for a young Heir is exactly the same with that of a Stockjobber to the Landed Gentry. But the landed gentry, the little Tory squires for whom Swift spoke, were no longer a power. The large landowners in the House of Lords had long been linked to the wool and other trades, and shared the money market. They were the very men who had brought William III to England. When Swift wrote, they were doubling their wealth in the growing com market. And they were staunch in the Whig connexion. Pope might go on raging against London’s voice: ‘Get Mony, Mony still! And then let Virtue follow, if she will’: the voice which whispers, ‘Be but Great, With Praise or Infamy, leave that to fate; Get Place and Wealth, if possible, with Grace; If not, by any means get Wealth and Place.’ He might see the whole society fawn on political jobbery: See thronging Millions to the Pagod run. And offer Country, Parent, Wife, or Son!

THE SEDITIOUS WRITINGS

49

Hear her black Trumpet thro’ the Land proclaim, That ‘Not to be corrupted is the Shame’. But he was so urgent, only because the corruption was so able. The Whig connexion had the means to bribe, and it knew whom to bribe. It calmly went on buying the Opposition. It had made a society, compact of the large holdings of trade and land, in the single interest of money. And whatever the cost, it defended it.

FOUR The cost was high. William III had brought John Locke with him from Holland, and had put him into the Court of Appeals and the Board of Trade, to lay down the ends of Whig society. The great and chief end, therefore, of men’s uniting into commonwealths, and putting themselves under government, is the preservation of their property. It is fair to add that Locke used the word ‘property’ to mean life and freedom as well as wealth: yet that usage, of that word, is itself revealing. When Locke wrote, in 1690, there were fewer than fifty hanging crimes. By the time that Blake was a boy, about 1767, Sir William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England counted about a hundred and fifty; and the number was still growing. Within another ten years, Adam Smith put Locke’s point with no fine usage. The affluence of the rich excites the indignation of the poor, who are often both driven by want and prompted by envy to invade their possessions. It is only under the shelter of the civil magistrate that the owner of that valuable property which is acquired by the labour of many years, or perhaps of many successive generations, can sleep a single night in se¬ curity. Blake saw truly when he came to use Locke’s name as a byword for a self-willed society of poverty, and for the wretched State of the Arts in this Country & in Europe, originating in the wretched State of Political Science, which is the Science of Sciences. 600

50

WILLIAM BLAKE AND THE AGE OF REVOLUTION

For political science and its law did not hang for crimes against the body, such as attempted murder. They did not hang for what were thought to be crimes against the spirit, such as witchcraft: in spite of Blackstone and the Bible, that had ceased to be a crime in 1736. Most of the new hanging crimes were crimes against wealth. Men were hanged for stealing forty shillings’ worth of goods from a house, or five shillings’ worth from a shop. They were hanged if they had not been seen to steal; they were not hanged if the theft had been witnessed. There were murderers whom it was found simpler to hang for burglary, and burglars whom it was simpler to hang for cutting down a tree. Wainewright was trans¬ ported not for his murders but for forgery’: the forgery, of course, was on one of the two great monopolies, the Bank of England, as Ryland’s had been on the other, the East India Company. We may judge how the law chose between Locke’s meanings of prop¬ erty, from the crimes of two men who were whipped round Covent Garden while Blake was an apprentice: the one for raping his niece, the other for stealing a bunch of radishes. The law was not merely savage, for lack of a police force; it was vicious, because it was irresponsible. Savagery and irresponsibility are the stamp of the town life of that age. It was not easy for a man to move about the country. The Elizabethan Poor Law held with little change long after Blake was bom; and it gave a man the right to relief only in the parish where he had settlement. Country parishes would spend five, ten, twenty pounds to forestall his settlement, lest he fall on the rates at some time. Only a bold, a foolhardy, or a desperate man would risk losing the right to relief, which was to him unemployment insurance, health insurance, and old-age pension in one. And such men drifted to the crowded parishes whose bumbles were too busy to pester them: the towns. The thief and the beggar drifted into town; but so did the honest man, hopeful or desperate; and once there, he often found no choice but to turn either thief or beggar. The town had little other work to offer him. For the town as we now know it is built round factory industries. But the industries of that time were scattered through such groups of villages as Manchester, Birmingham, and the Five Towns then were. The eighteenth-century town lived by trade. It housed some craftsmen, who tried to guard their skill and their status carefully.

THE SEDITIOUS WRITINGS

51

But the bulk of its poor lived by casual work. The casual worker, English or often Irish, might earn much one day and nothing the next; because he lived uncertainly, he squandered the much on whores and publicans: in short, the eighteenth-century town lived like the trade town of to-day, the port. The largest towns of the time, London, Bristol, Liverpool, Glasgow, and Dublin, were in fact ports. Their squalor was the squalor of the slums and stews of Marseilles. They were overcrowded: for town building to house the poor, who had little to do there, was for long unlawful. They were, of course, unwholesome, although it is not certain that they were more unwholesome than the cottages of the country poor. They were riotous and dangerous, the home of the pimp and the pickpocket, the sharper, the footpad, and the gangster: even the highwayman was a London, not a country pest. They lived from hand to mouth, by their wits. And they snatched their happiness in the stupor of gin. Nothing tells so frighteningly the misery of the poor in the towns as the rise of gin drinking, until the cheap raw spirit became less a drug than an infection. Seventy years before Blake’s birth England had been drinking about half a million gallons of spirits a year. When Blake was bom, she was drinking nearly eight million gallons a year: about a gallon each man, woman, and child. Three Acts of Parliament had not halted the evil; it fell back only in face of the dearths of corn. And in the year of his death Blake could still write, as a bitter pun about the Holy Ghost, Spirits are Lawful, but not Ghosts; especially Royal Gin is Lawful Spirit. 787 Into this thieves’ kitchen, the London still of Hogarth of A Rake’s Progress and Gin Lane, William Blake was bom. Here the rich and the poor still gambled together; and Gay had won¬ dered which aped the vices of the other. Here the men who fought their way up never lost the scars and the fears of their past. Samuel Johnson when he had £300 a year still tore at his food like a dog. But Johnson had lived like a dog; he had known his friend Richard Savage die like a dog. The men who rose dared not look at their money too closely. Johnson’s £300 was a pension from George III, whose right to the Crown Johnson denied; and Johnson had taken it, seven years after his dictionary had defined a pension as

52

WILLIAM BLAKE AND THE AGE OF REVOLUTION

‘pay given to a state hireling for treason to his country’. Those who fell gambled even in the dock. Since punishment was savage, unequal, and random, juries at times were loth to convict: Would they rate the theft at more than five shillings, or less? Would they call a bank-note money or paper? If the gambler lost, the crowd would turn out for him in gentlemanly acknowledgement; and he, in gentlemanly acknowledgement, sometimes hanged fairly cheer¬ fully. For the crowd which made a legend of the sordid lives of gunmen was speaking its sympathy with all that was reckless, lawless, and anti-social. Gay, in The Beggar’s Opera, and Henry Fielding had found the story of the receiver Jonathan Wild, who was hanged in 1725, an apt satire on their Governments. But if the crowd read, it read the story as Defoe told it; and found it more terribly apt to the double dealing of a whole society. Its heroes spoke the gambler’s contempt for a society of cheats. When Blake was a young man the crowd still gathered at The Dog and Duck near St George’s Fields to see the highwaymen set off and the flashy women come out to take leave of the thieves at dusk and wish them success.

FIVE Yet it was a society; and when Blake was bom it could still flower richly. The elder Pitt had become Prime Minister in that year. Within four years he had broken the imperial power of France, fear of which had shaped Whig Policy for seventy years in war and peace. While Frederick the Great marched and counter¬ marched like another Marlborough to hold France in Europe, Pitt took the hope of Indian empire from her at Plassey in 1757; won her Canadian empire at Quebec in 1759; and broke her sea power in two battles in the West Indies, in 1759 and 1761. Vast markets were opened to England: at the peace of 1763 she rated the untapped market of Canada higher than the spice islands of the West Indies. A world lay conquered for her trade; a greater Whig age seemed about to begin. The trade came, but the Whigs went. For in 1760 a Tory and a High Churchman, George III, had become by the Grace of God King, Defender of the Faith. In

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53

1761 Pitt resigned. About this time the child Blake saw his first vision of God, and screamed. Self-willed, narrow, patient, dull, and unbelievably mulish, George III was not a man who should make history. Nor is it likely that he made it. He pressed from the beginning of his reign the Tory policy which England took up thirty years later. But England did not take up this policy because it was his. George III and his policy were both disliked; and he went on being disliked after the policy became common. Larger fears made that Tory reaction country-wide, from the time of the French Revolution in 1789: fear of the unseen but haunting mass of the poor which the Industrial Revolution and the enclosures were making. George III was merely the symbol of Toryism: at most, a chance first fruit of reaction. When George III became king, the Young Pretender was sullenly drinking himself to death. But George III set out to remake a Toryism more Stuart than his. He set himself to be a king: and his notion of kingship was to be free of the interests which made Eng¬ land, whatever they might be. This was not because he thought himself fitted to rule. He thought, and said, that he would ‘make but a very poor and despicable figure’; and it is one of his few sound judgements. He distrusted himself, and dared not meet statesmen of power and ability lest he ‘be shackled by those desperate men’. He enlarged these jealous fears to a hysteria which faced every trifling change with the will, in a cold sweat, that whilst any ten men in the Kingdom will stand by me, I will not give myself up to bondage. This is a temper to pity, and to smile at. But it remained the temper of his grand-daughter, more than a hundred years later, firm that She will sooner abdicate than send for or have any communi¬ cation with that half-mad firebrand who would soon ruin everything and be a Dictator. Queen Victoria wrote this in 1880 about Gladstone. And it leaves no doubt that George Ill’s Toryism had little to do with the larger fears which came to unite owners later in his reign. The causes of fear were not yet over the horizon, even during the American war

54

WILLIAM BLAKE AND THE AGE OF REVOLUTION

from 1775, when George III wrote and rewrote his abdications. But England was ruled by the Toryism of fear; and soon Blake would see Infinite London’s awful spires cast a dreadful cold Even on rational things beneath and from the palace walls Around Saint James’s, chill & heavy, even to the city gate. 205 The King of England looking westward trembles at the vision. 197 To drive the Whigs from public life, George III did not scruple to corrupt that life more openly than they had dared. The Secret Service fund bought votes for the King’s Friends at elections. Ire¬ land was taxed to death for sinecures in his gift. In his lifetime George III doubled the shrinking House of Lords, which hitherto had counted fewer than two hundred peers: and made it what John Wilkes foretold, the Dead Weight of the Constitution. De¬ signedly, George III filled his Governments with weak and anxious men. Within three years he had embroiled them with Wilkes, for no better reason than that Wilkes was a tool of the elder Pitt. Al¬ though Wilkes might have been bought cheaply in 1765, George III carried on the quarrel, always in the wrong, until Wilkes became spokesman for the whole City interest. By 1774 Wilkes was Lord Mayor of London, and had been elected to Parliament five times by Middlesex, in face of four unlawful expulsions. He at once attacked the threatened war against America on behalf of the City and of the Americans, who both petitioned through him. We can trace the singleness of these liberal trading interests in that Wilkes and Benjamin Franklin, then in London on behalf of the Americans, were both Freemasons. Blake took some of his symbolism from Freemasonry.

SIX Blake grew to be a man during the American war, from 1775 to 1783. The causes of this war were manifold. The American colonies could not have been held for ever under laws which forbade them all trade but with England; Ireland also rebelled against such laws in time. The colonies could not have been forbidden for ever to manufacture from their own raw stuffs. They could not be denied for ever a greater share in their local governments. They wanted

THE SEDITIOUS WRITINGS

55

freedom to move into newly conquered French lands. And freed of a French threat, they wanted above all to be let be. Yet it is not certain that these wishes need have become pressing in George Ill’s long reign, had not his Ministries of None of the Talents chosen to repress them. The Ministers indeed were fairly helpless. The elder Pitt had won an empire; but they still had to pay for the victory, in a time of dearths, slump, and rising prices. They were not simply prompted by budget needs; yet these needs made a show of reasonableness for acts which were foolish. They were taking the Tory line in every slump: to retrench, and to shift the burden of upkeep elsewhere. And since they did not understand the Whig ‘clamour of trade, of the merchants, and of the manufacturing towns’, that slumps can be eased only by easing trade, they turned their colonial policy into a party fight. They began by trying, in 1764, to check American smuggling to and from the French West Indies. This smuggling had always been unlawful. But without it, the trading laws were unworkable. The West Indies had become the clearing house for American export of sugar, tobacco, timber, and other raw stuffs, and for the import of manufactures and of slaves. Usage and need had made a right of this smuggling, as open as England’s unlawful right to smuggle to Spanish South America. It was only twenty-five years since England had gone to war with Spain to uphold her right. Where both sides were thus righteous and ill at ease, both looked for a better quarrel in trifles. They quarrelled over petty taxes. Having withdrawn some, the Ministers made a show of dignity with others; and the Americans saw in them the show of spite. In 1772 the slump broke many English banks and houses, among them the East India Company. The Government in effect took India from the Company; and in exchange allowed it to take tea to America without taxing it in England. It was a smaller trifle than others, and likely to harm no one but Boston holders of stocks of dear tea. But it was a break with the vexed trading laws, made not on behalf of Americans but of an English monopoly. Resist¬ ance, boycott, and fighting became open between 1773 and 1775. The American war had begun. Nearly two-thirds of the tea then drunk in England was smuggled, and George Ill’s Ministers did not scruple to share in the trade.

56

WILLIAM BLAKE AND THE AGE OF REVOLUTION

The American colonies were not one in this war, even after the Declaration of Independence in 1776. There were guerrillas fighting for England as bloodily as against her; and those who fought against England were not all Americans. George Washington won the American war when he did, mastering indifference, division, and treachery among his troops, in part at least because he could pay them with French loans and stiffen them with French troops and ships. The Americans who cornered an English army at Yorktown in 1781, and watched them march out to the tune of The World Turned Upside Down, had indeed won the war, against Ministers masterly and criminal in incompetence. But Benjamin Franklin had still to make the peace by which England acknowledged Amer¬ ican Independence in 1783, in Paris: although, to make it, he consented to betray his French allies. But it was not these causes, and not what the Americans had at stake, which stamped Blake’s mind. What was urgent to Blake was what moved everyone in England in these years: the fight between principles which were believed to be at stake in England. Here, these principles were freed from the jealousies between the colonies, from the embarrassment of French and Spanish help, from Ameri¬ can fanatics sacking the houses of exiles, and from profiteers buying them with paper money. In England what was at stake was thought of very simply. Bigoted Ministers were enforcing laws which were flatly against the wishes of England and America alike. And they were doing so by means which no Government should use against its own people. Therefore Edmund Burke, that overwound machine for saying uncommonly whatever was common talk, aimed his attacks at Government tyranny and bigotry. I am not one of those who think that the people are never in the wrong. They have been so, frequently and outrageously, both in other countries and in this. But I do sav, that in all disputes between them and their rulers, the presumption is at least upon a par in favour of the people. The question with me is, not w'hether you have a right to render your people miserable; but whether it is not in your interest to make them happy. It is not, what a lawyer tells me, I may do; but what humanity, reason, and justice, tell me, I ought to do.

THE SEDITIOUS WRITINGS

57

And the Black and Tan means used against the Americans aroused greater bitterness. The Ministers were shamefaced, but they could hardly do without Red Indians and German mercenaries. English dissenters and others felt kin only to the men who fought for America. Paid armies had never been liked in England; but hitherto, war had not been disliked. The great English patriotic songs had just become well known: Henry Fielding’s and Richard Leveridge’s two versions of The Roast Beef of Old England, about 1733; James Thomson’s Rule Britannia, in 1740; God Save the King, in 1745; and David Garrick’s Heart of Oak, in 1759. During the American war one broadside, The British Grenadiers of 1780, tried to rouse their fervour again. But a poem printed in 1782, The Drum of John Scott of Amwell, set down the mood which could find readers for the first time during the American war. I hate that drum’s discordant sound. Parading round, and round, and round: To thoughtless youth it pleasure yields, And lures from cities and from fields, To sell their liberty for charms Of tawdry lace, and glittering arms; And when Ambition’s voice commands, To march, and fight, and fall, in foreign lands. I hate that drum’s discordant sound, Parading round, and round, and round: To me it talks of ravag’d plains, And burning towns, and ruin’d swains, And mangled limbs, and dying groans, And widows’ tears, and orphans’ moans; And all that Misery’s hand bestows, To fill the catalogue of human woes. John Scott was a Quaker, bold enough soberly to speak the Quaker mind. And his poem did not pass without attack. But the feeling against war for which he speaks moved all enlightened men, and moved them for the first time, during the American war. We may read the same feeling in the boyhood Poetical Sketches, which Blake printed in 1783—probably with the same printer who printed John Scott’s poems. We may see it in two drawings which Blake showed at the Royal Academy in 1784, War Unchained by an

58

WILLIAM BLAKE AND THE AGE OF REVOLUTION

Angel—Fire, Pestilence, and Famine Following, and strikingly in A Breach in the City—The Morning after a Battle. We may go on reading it in the Auguries of Innocence, which Blake wrote later, during the French wars. The Strongest Poison ever known Came from Caesar’s Laurel Crown. Nought can deform the Human Race Like to the Armour’s iron brace.

433

And Blake always held this feeling in the whole context made by the American war and the England of his time: the context of tyranny and poverty, as well as of war. As a boy, he had set the scene for Gwin, King of Norway thus, in the Poetical Sketches. The Nobles of the land did feed Upon the hungry Poor; They tear the poor man’s lamb, and drive The needy from their door!

11

As a man, he saw war in that larger context. The Beggar’s Rags, fluttering in Air, Does to Rags the Heavens tear. The Soldier, arm’d with Sword & Gun, Palsied strikes the Summer’s Sun. The poor Man’s Farthing is worth more Than all the Gold on Afric’s Shore. One Mite wrung from the Labrer’s hands Shall buy & sell the Miser’s Lands: Or, if protected from on high, Does that whole Nation sell & buy.

432

SEVEN Two causes had thrust independence early on a fairly unwilling America. Of course one, in England, was George Ill’s wish to rule England without her ruling interests. He could rule so only by setting one faction against another, the City against the West Indian Planters, the East India Company against the parliamentary nabobs who had enriched themselves in the Company’s service. Divided in principle, and divided by such intrigues, England was never likely to win with decision. But the larger cause was in Amer¬ ica: that the colonies, scattered, jealous, and of many minds, were

THE SEDITIOUS WRITINGS

59

against any single Government. Only because Ministers tried to force on them a strong single Government in England did they choose a weak single Government in America. The unwilling choice could still help to make civil war in 1861; and is not yet forgotten in American politics. Yet the king who ruled by division, and who had lost thirteen colonies by overriding their divisions, found England moving to¬ gether behind his Minister, within a year; and in half a dozen years knew her single-minded and of his own mind. Even before the end of 1783, Charles James Fox’s bill to rule India under Whig patronage was petitioned against not only by the shaky East India Company, but by City merchants who might have welcomed this slackening of the Company’s monopoly. George III felt strong enough to kill the Bill by his most outrageous message to the Lords, that ‘he should deem those who should vote for the bill not only not his friends but his enemies’. Next year, England’s pocketful of voters—three hundred thousand in a population of eight millions— entrenched the king’s new tool, William Pitt the younger, then twenty-five, as Prime Minister for eighteen years. The City gave Pitt its freedom, and Wilkes stood for the Government. The Whig Opposition lost a hundred and sixty seats. It was perhaps a first step in that moving together of nabobs and squires, planters and peers, merchants, manufacturers, and Tories, which became plain after the French Revolution. Perhaps the movement of fear was beginning: the causes of fear were coming over the horizon. In place of the smiling years before 1757, there were high prices, heavier taxes, and a growing, hungry population. There was a new anger in the crowd, and a harsh will to destroy. Riot had always been ‘part of the mode of government’ of a society whose poor had no vote and no Press. In 1769 Benjamin Franklin had seen within a year, riots in this country about com; riots about elections; riots about workhouses; riots of colliers; riots of weavers; riots of coalheavers; riots of sawyers; riots of sailors, riots of Wilkites, riots of government chairmen, riots of smugglers. But now the riots ceased to have heroes, and perhaps an understood aim. The six or seven good years which followed the American

60

WILLIAM BLAKE AND THE AGE OF REVOLUTION

peace, and which made Pitt’s name, put off the fear a little longer. But there had been a riot in 1780 which had put the fear of God even into those who had not been loth to see it begin. Just who these were has never become plain. The sixty thousand men who marched from St George’s Fields to Westminster on 2 June 1780 were petitioning for the repeal of a Roman Catholic Relief Act, which was then two years old. But on that day the Duke of Richmond was moving a Whig Suffrage Bill, which George III certainly disliked as much as he had disliked the Relief Act. On the other hand, the leader of the petition, Lord George Gordon, was seconded by Alderman Frederick Bull, a Member for the City of London and tool of Wilkes. The City had long been skilful in the raising of such riots, for example on behalf of Wilkes; and had not scupled to give them a religious air, for example against the Jewish Naturalization Act in 1753. There is no doubt that the rioters took orders from Bull and other City men, at a linen draper’s house in the Minories. For the City certainly wished to overthrow the Government, then at its weakest, and so to end the American war. It may have hoped to get rid of George III, who was known to be bracing himself to abdicate. But by an ironic chance, the timing of the riots may also have chimed happily with George Ill’s own dislikes. That night the rioters sacked the chapels of foreign embassies, among them one near Golden Square, where Blake lived over his father’s hosier’s shop. On the following nights their attacks spread from Roman Catholic houses to those of Ministers, magistrates, judges, and bishops; and then to courts, prisons, and public build¬ ings. Franklin in Paris heard of the gutting of the house of the Chief Justice of the King’s Bench with a pleasure which speaks all the bitterness of the American war, Among the rest Lord Mansfield’s house is burnt with all his furniture, pictures, books and papers. Thus he who approved the burning of American houses, has had fire brought home to him. On 6 June the rioters burned Newgate prison. On 7 June there were fires throughout the City, and the Bank of England was attacked. The rioters were going too far. That day, urged by the Opposition, George III issued a military proclamation. Troops were brought in

THE SEDITIOUS WRITINGS

to hold the three bridges and the main streets and buildings. Wilkes was now firing with the militia, and other City men grew warm in their duty. Though the rioters attacked the Bank again on 8 June, they were beaten off. London was fairly quiet by the following night; and other cities did as London did. About 300 rioters had been killed, and more wounded. Of 160 others tried, only sixty-two were condemned to death, and in fact only twenty-five were hanged: so plain was it that the leaders had not been taken. Most of those taken were hardly more than children. In the upshot, the Gordon riots saved the falling Government. And they showed that the easy, riotous crowd of the eighteenth century could no longer be raised and handled at will. The talk of reform began to falter. Whigs drifted into Pitt’s following, the Duke of Richmond among the first. Burke began to wonder whether still ‘the presumption is at least upon a par in favour of the people’. And more stable men than Burke began to look askance at the round Declaration which had sounded noble in 1776. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness-That to secure these fights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, - That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long estab¬ lished should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accus¬ tomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pur¬ suing invariably the same Object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

The Seditions Writings

ONE William Blake was among those at the head of the crowd which burned Newgate prison on 6 June 1780: and his drawing which is usually called Glad Day may be meant to applaud the rising. He seems indeed to have been carried there by chance; and we know of others in the crowd who took no part in the burning, among them the poet George Crabbe. Crabbe had then just come to London to the patronage of Burke, of which Blake wrote with contempt later in the bitter years of the French wars. Unlike Burke, Crabbe kept his sympathy with the poor; and Blake did not grow afraid of the crowd, then or later. Both poets, young men in their twenties, began to look away from the eighteenth-century manner, into a world seen solidly by its shadows. This is the movement of Crabbe’s mind from The Library to The Village. No; cast by Fortune on a frowning coast, Which neither groves nor happy valleys boast; Where other cares than those the Muse relates, And other Shepherds dwell with other mates; By such examples taught, I paint the Cot, As truth will paint it and as bards will not. Nor you, ye Poor, of letter’d scorn complain, To you the smoothest song is smooth in vain; O’ercome by labour and bow’d down by time, Feel you the barren flattery of a rhyme? Can Poets sooth you, when you pine for bread, By winding myrtles round your ruin’d shed? 62

THE SEDITIOUS WRITINGS

63

And this is the movement of Blake from the Poetical Sketches to the like wish of the Songs of Innocence, to find a symbolism more robust than the eighteenth-century picnic. Blake was a man whose mind moved slowly; and between 1780 and 1790 had to find his place in the bodily world as well as in that of the mind. His apprenticeship had ended in 1779, and he had married in 1782. He was earning his living by working hard at hack¬ work. After his father’s death in 1784 Blake opened a print-shop with a fellow engraver, and took his brother Robert with him. The shop seems not to have done well, and was given up after Robert’s death three years later. Meanwhile, Blake was reading Swedenborg and other odd, self-willed men. He drifted into and out of the friendship of pious liberals of vague goodwill, such as the Reverend Anthony Stephen Mathew and his blue-stocking wife. Blake had written nothing now for ten years. But his mind was becoming his own; and about 1784 he began a satire which set him to writing the Songs of Innocence. This satire, which is commonly called An Island in the Moon, is aimed in the main at the utilitarians and cranks whom Blake had met at the Mathews’. But there are others in it who belong to less rationalist sets. Steelyard the Lawgiver, whose name caricatures the scales of Justice (a steelyard is a Roman balance), is a Whig of the patriotic age. ‘Hm,’ said the Lawgiver, ‘Funny enough! Let’s have handel's water piece.’ Then Sipsop sung: ‘A crowned king, On a white horse sitting, With his trumpets sounding, And Banners flying, Thro’ the clouds of smoke he makes his way, And the shout of his thousands fills his heart with rejoicing & victory: And the shout of his thousands fills his heart with rejoicing & victory. Victory! Victory! 'twas William, the prince of Orange,—’ 62 For Handel had been Court composer in the great Whig reign of George II. Pope had sneered magnificently at George II’s reluctance to go to war and his philistinism together.

64

WILLIAM BLAKE AND THE AGE OF REVOLUTION

While You, great Patron of Mankind, sustain The balanc’d World, and open all the Main; Your Country, chief, in Arms abroad defend, At home, with Morals, Arts, and Laws amend; How shall the Muse, from such a Monarch, steal An hour, and not defraud the Publick Weal? Nevertheless, in George II’s reign the Whigs, who had once brought William III from Orange, had won an empire for England. The towns had grown evil in his reign. But also, men had come to take white bread and leather shoes for granted, and had learnt to speak of comfort: they had made the cry ‘Roast Beef English for ‘Eureka’. To Blake’s mind now, George Ill’s American war had made the patriotic songs of that age false also. An Island in the Moon recalls Leveridge’s lines, Our Fathers of old were robust, stout, and strong, And kept open House with good Cheer all Day long. Which made their plump Tenants rejoice in this song, Oh the Roast Beef of Old England, And Old English Roast Beef. But it recalls them as model for a satire sung by Steelyard the Lawgiver. This city & this country has brought forth many mayors, To sit in state & give forth laws out of their old oak chairs, With face as brown as any nut with drinking of strong ale; Good English hospitality, O then it did not fail! With scarlet gowns & broad gold lace would make a yeoman sweat, With stockings roll’d above their knees & shoes as black as jet. With eating beef & drinking beer, O they were stout & hale! Good English hospitality, O then it did not fail! Thus sitting at the table wide, the Mayor & Aldermen Were fit to give law to the city; each eat as much as ten. The hungry poor enter’d the hall, to eat good beef & ale. Good English hospitality, O then it did not fail!

58

The poor in the Gordon riots also had begun by cheering the Lord Mayor, and ended by attacking the Mansion House. And often

THE SEDITIOUS WRITINGS

65

since Blake’s birth, the hungry poor had been rioting for bread in and out of London. Steelyard the Lawgiver leaves no doubt that the Island in the Moon was larger than Mrs Mathew’s drawing-room; and leaves no doubt where in that island Blake’s sympathy fell.

TWO About the time that Blake was writing An Island in the Moon, he had begun to meet more radical men at the house of the bookseller Joseph Johnson. Although An Island in the Moon mocks their owlish and long-winded foibles, it shows also on what grounds Blake met them. One such ground was the hatred of war which the Amer¬ ican war had prompted. And the American war had enlarged a common hatred of all the tools for forcing unwelcome government on men who had chosen their own. These remained the grounds on which, half a dozen years later, the war against the French Revolu¬ tion was attacked by the more liberal Whigs: Fox, Grey, Sheridan, Erskine, Whitbread, the Dukes of Bedford and of Norfolk. But Blake shared with Joseph Johnson’s radicals a more searching hatred for the subtler tools of oppression: poverty, ignorance, and government itself. Steelyard the Lawgiver is already that false ‘Albion the punisher & judge’ whom Blake saw to the end of his life as one who sat by Tyburn’s brook, and underneath his heel shot up A deadly Tree: he nam’d it Moral Virtue and the Law Of God.

652

Blake was already of the mind which he set down plainly at the beginning of the war against the French Revolution, In the North, to Odin, Sotha gave a Code of War, Because of Diralada, thinking to reclaim his joy. These were the Churches, Hospitals, Castles, Palaces, Like nets & gins & traps to catch the joys of Eternity, And all the rest a desart; Till, like a dream, Eternity was obliterated & erased. Thus the terrible race of Los & Enitharmon gave Laws & Religions to the sons of Har, binding them more

66

WILLIAM BLAKE AND THE AGE OF REVOLUTION

And more to Earth, closing and restraining. Till a Philosophy of Five Senses was complete. Urizen wept & gave it into the hands of Newton & Locke.

246

Here and elsewhere, when Blake thinks of his society he attacks its religion. Now that the last commandments are less well remem¬ bered than by-laws, we tend to yawn through these attacks. But the religious changes of Blake’s lifetime were urgent to him and to his fellows. The rationalism which had grown in the Church during the Whig age was being formalized, for example by William Paley, who saw God as a strict designer for use. But even this ‘Philosophy of Five Senses’ was no longer rigid enough for the Church. Paley got no preferment, and George III thought him ‘a dangerous re¬ volutionary’. At the same time the revival which John Wesley had been leading since 1739 was breaking the old link between dissent and political freedom. Wesley alone among dissenters had upheld George III in the American war. The men who met at Joseph Johnson’s were not of one religious mind. There was among them a Roman Catholic Bible critic; and Johnson printed the evangelical poems of Cowper. Nevertheless, these men were the last defenders of the liberal tradition of dissent. Many of them were Unitarians from the great dissenting academies, tolerant even of other Uni¬ tarians. Of the two outstanding Unitarians who met at Johnson’s, Joseph Priestley looked for the bases of religion rationally, in experi¬ ence. But Richard Price did not wholly share this deism: and held that man has an inborn knowledge of right and wrong, in inno¬ cence. Blake had gone neither to the dissenting academies nor to any other school. His father had been a dissenter who may have known of Swedenborg. Blake’s friends Flaxman and Butts belonged to the following of Swedenborg, and Blake leaned to it. Yet, unlike Swedenborg’s, Blake’s robust mysticism did not underrate ex¬ perience. Rather Blake shared the belief of Price, that the content of experience is not merely rational. He believed that experience comes to man from outside, but is shaped in him always as human experience. It was this feeling of humanity which made him value Lavater’s glib Aphorisms on Man. We may read it in the first two aphorisms, Know, in the first place, that mankind agree in essence, as they do in their limbs and senses.

THE SEDITIOUS WRITINGS

67

Mankind differ as much in essence as they do in form, limbs, and senses—arid only so, and not more, beside which Blake wrote, This is true Christian philosophy far above all abstraction.

65

Henry Fuseli had just translated these Aphorisms, and Joseph Johnson had printed them in 1788 with a plate engraved by Blake after Fuseli. In reading Lavater and Swedenborg together, Blake was trying to work out a common form for dissent. He was trying to fit experience to innocence. It is the theme of all that he wrote in these years. This is the starting point, in 1789, of the prophetic books Tiriel and The Book of Thel, as plainly as of the Songs of Innocence. Both prophetic books set out the same belief, that knowledge is not bounded by the senses, but that it must be made actual through the senses. The virgin Thel, who has held back from experience, finds knowledge only in death. Blake is using the symbol of death as the eighteenth century had once used the word, to mean the experience of sex. The old man Tiriel, the blind hypocrite of will, thinks it wisdom to enslave the sons who are his rebellious thoughts, and the five daughters who are his senses; but he and they suffer the horrors of King Lear until he learns to free them from such wisdom and its laws. Both books ask the same question in the same words. Can Wisdom be put in a silver rod? Or Love in a golden bowl?

127

And both answer that experience is neither gold nor silver, but earthen. Blake took this questioning farthest in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. The simple proverbs and visions of this book are still religious parables. And they begin from religious thoughts: from Swedenborg’s Vision of Heaven and Hell, and from two notes which Blake wrote in the margin of Swedenborg’s Wisdom of Angels Concerning Divine Love and Divine Wisdom, Good & Evil are here both Good & the two contraries Married. Heaven & Hell are born together.

91 96

But now the force which holds experience to innocence is no longer mystic. The reasoning begins as in Tiriel and The Book

68

WILLIAM BLAKE AND THE AGE OF REVOLUTION

of Thel. What is known is good only so long as it is experienced. Wben knowledge forgets the experience in which it lived, it be¬ comes the contradiction of experience, rigid and evil: Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion. 151 Therefore only that which knowledge calls evil is then experienced and truly good. Experience must now be charged, explosively, with innocence: The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.

152

This energy, which makes a single urge and judgement of inno¬ cence within experience, is the new force of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. From this time, energy becomes the core of Blake’s religious thought. There is here a striking hint of the crime story, in which the anti-social crowd of the eighteenth century was happy: evil and energy exploding society for its good. This anarch¬ ism remains masterful in Blake’s prophetic books.

THREE The time-table of the prophetic books is fairly certainly known. Blake wrote Tiriel about 1789, and etched The Book of Thel in the same year. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell was etched between 1790 and 1793; and all copies of it have for last pages A Song of Liberty, although this may not have been written as part of it. In 1793 Blake etched Visions of the Daughters of Albion and America, and in 1794 Europe and The Book of Urizen. In 1795 he etched The Book of Ahania, The Book of Los, and The Song of Los. He wrote Vala or The Four Zoas at times between 1795 and 1804, leaving it in a manuscript which he had dated 1797. He etched Milton and Jerusalem after 1804. These dates are not chance: they are the forgotten key to much that is secret in the manner of the prophetic books. The manner is of a piece with the vague grandiloquence of their names, Tiriel, The Book of Ahania, Vala or The Four Zoas. But the list shows a set of names which bear recognizably on the world which we know: A Song of Liberty, Visions of the Daughters of Albion, America,

THE SEDITIOUS WRITINGS

6g

and Europe. All these were written between 1790 and 1794, and probably towards the end of this time. In Tiriel, in The Book of Thel, and in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Blake had moved from the attack on the religion of ‘Thou shalt not’ step by step to the attack on law. Now, in the books written between 1790 and 1794> turned this attack on law frankly upon the England of his time. And he left no doubt of his social aim when, in 1790 or 1791, he began a book which he simply called The French Revolution. In order that we may be sure that the Albion, the America, and the Europe of these books are the places which we know by these names, let us look at them in the first lines of A Song of Liberty. 1. The Eternal Female groan’d! it was heard over all the Earth. 2. Albion’s coast is sick, silent; the American meadows faint! 3. Shadows of Prophecy shiver along by the lakes and the rivers, and mutter across the ocean: France, rend down thy dungeon! 4. Golden Spain, burst the barriers of old Rome! 5. Cast thy keys, O Rome, into the deep down falling, even to eternity down falling. 6. And weep. 7. In her trembling hands she took the new born terror, howling. 8. On those infinite mountains of light, now barr’d out by the atlantic sea, the new born fire stood before the starry king! 9. Flag’d with grey brow’d snows and thunderous visages, the jealous wings wav’d over the deep. 10. The speary hand burned aloft, unbuckled was the shield; forth went the hand of jealousy among the flaming hair, and hurl’d the new born wonder thro’ the starry night. 11. The fire, the fire is falling! 12. Look up! look up! O citizen of London, enlarge thy coun¬ tenance! O Jew, leave counting gold! return to thy oil and wine. O African! black African! (go, winged thought, widen his forehead.) 159 This is not a fable about the Eternal Female and the ‘infinite mountains of light’ of Atlantis. It is a piece of rhetoric about the French Revolution, seen as the first outcome of the American revolt; and it calls for a like outcome the world over. Nor is it tact-

yo

WILLIAM BLAKE AND THE AGE OF REVOLUTION

fully guarded in its calls. The call to the Roman Catholic Church might be forgiven, in the biblical setting of the verses. But the call to Spain raised an echo which went on troubling English Ministers for twenty-five years, perhaps for a hundred and fifty years. It was in Spain that the British policy was most completely stultified. Ferdinand VII restored the Inquisition, abolished the Constitution, and imprisoned or executed the leading Liberals, the very men who admired most fervently the funda¬ mental principles of English political and social life. To re¬ establish his despotism the Spanish King employed troops paid with British gold and led by British officers. The Opposi¬ tion at Westminster raised violent protests, and the Ministry scarcely dared to defend their action. The Cabinet even ad¬ mitted that were any intervention in Spain admissible, it would be against absolutism. They were well aware—their ambas¬ sador at Madrid had informed them of it—that every success of absolutism in the Peninsula was so much loss to British influence. So wrote Halevy, in 1912; he was writing of the year 1814. Long before that year, the Sedition Acts had silenced every call to the ‘citizen of London'. But even the call to the black African was not wise. For about the time that Blake wrote A Song of Liberty, the movement to end slavery suffered two set-backs: the slaves of French Haiti revolted; and the French Convention, without irony, made William Wilberforce a French citizen. The Jew alone was left no choice but to do as Blake asked; for the Bank of England stopped paying gold in 1797.

FOUR A Song of Liberty is rhetorical, and therefore is vague. But those to whom it calls are actual, and what it says to them is apt. So The French Revolution, Visions of the Daughters of Albion, America, and Europe are named and written to catch other eyes than those which might linger on Tiriel and The Book of Thel. In the years 1790 to 1794 Blake felt that what he had to say should reach as many men as it could. He had printed no book since Flaxman and Mrs Mathew had printed his boyhood Poetical Sketches in 1783.

THE SEDITIOUS WRITINGS

71

He had left Tiriel in manuscript, and etched The Book of Thel himself. He .did one or the other with everything else that he wrote, except once. When he began The French Revolution, in 1790 or 1.791, he did not etch it: he set about having it printed. And he wrote it more directly, in its orator’s manner, than anything else which he wrote. Yet The French Revolution was not printed; it was not even finished. And in the other books of these very years the writing from page to page grows vaguer and thicker. The rhetoric clogs and mumbles with unheard names, Oothoon, Ore, Enitharmon; and we are suddenly aware that Blake has wandered off into those mazes of their family troubles which henceforth fill his prophetic books. This is not mysticism, but mystery, and mystification. Why should Blake choose to play at it at the one time when he felt it urgent to speak to more than the fifty friends who bought his poems? How did he come to turn back from this urgency so soon, how did he come to turn at all, to the roaring but dumb harangues of the prophetic books? These puzzles reach back to a simpler question: Why was The French Revolution not printed? It was to have been printed in seven books, perhaps without Blake’s name, for Joseph Johnson. We have a proof copy of the first book, dated 1791, and giving its price as a shilling: so that we know that this book was set. It may be that Joseph Johnson then came to doubt whether the book would sell. But he had little to lose by printing and binding so cheap a book, once it had been set. Certainly, if Johnson doubted whether the book would sell, it was not because he had changed his mind about the French Revolution; but because others had. The mind of England was visibly clouding and lowering. After Louis XVI had tried to fly from France in June 1791, English newspapers began to print rumours that there would be rioting if the fall of the Bastille were again toasted in England in July. Punctually a well-schooled crowd in Birmingham sacked the houses of Joseph Priestley and of other dissenters. Joseph Johnson still went on to print Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792, and Wil¬ liam Godwin’s Enquiry Concerning Political Justice in 1793. The Government had let it be known that it did not trouble itself about such highly priced books. But Johnson had been wary of another

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cheap book: and this, precisely in 1791. Early in that year he had been printing the first part of Tom Paine’s Rights of Man; and, suddenly and sensationally, had turned it over to another printer, after some copies had already been printed with his own name. This was a book of whose sales Johnson had no doubt. He gave it up because, in 1791, he saw the attack on the Press blowing up. It blew up in May 1792, in the Royal Proclamation against Divers Wicked Seditious Writings; and Paine and his printer were prose¬ cuted after the second part of The Rights of Man. In September 1792 another warrant was issued against Paine for a speech which he had just made to the Friends of the People. It was Blake who packed him off from Joseph Johnson’s to France (so the story goes), twenty minutes before the warrant followed him to Dover. There had been many signs of the political bad weather to come, between 1789 and 1791; and men less shrewd than Joseph Johnson had read them. But no one could guess how fierce the storm to come would be. At the time of the Proclamation against Seditious Writings there had been little violence in France. There had been nothing in England more threatening than the founding of the London Corresponding Soeietv, a penny-a-week club of working¬ men for parliamentary reform; and of the Friends of the People, a Whig club with the same aim at two and a half guineas a year. Meanwhile, the European kings had founded their own alliance; and the Duke of Brunswick, marching on France, proclaimed their policy as slaughter of all who threatened Louis XVI. Only after this proclamation, in August 1792, did the Paris crowd storm the Tuileries, and begin the first Terror of September. The crowd could hardly guess that the Austrian Minister was then writing, The re-establishment of order is no longer to be considered the most important object of our military' operations. Tire continuance of disorder and civil war must even be regarded as favourable to our cause, and the return of peace, consequent on the arrangement of a French Constitution of some kind, will be a benefit which France will have to- purchase by the sacrifice of the province we shall have conquered. Nevertheless, the crowd drove the Duke of Brunswick’s army into^ Holland, and began the trial of Louis XVI. In England, the younger Pitt grew hysterical at Cabinet meetings—’Probably by

THE SEDITIOUS WRITINGS

73

this time to-morrow we may not have a hand to act, or a tongue to utter’—and called up part of the militia, on the ground of acts of riot and insurrection. Where were these acts? asked Fox. The answer was folded away in a letter which the mainstay of Pitt’s Government, Lord Grenville, had just written to a loyal alarmist. It is not unnatural, nor is it an unfavourable symptom, that people who are thoroughly frightened, as the bodv of landed gentlemen in this country are, should exaggerate these stories as they pass from one mouth to the other; but you who know the course of this sort of reports, ought not too hastily to give credit to them. In January' 1793 Louis XVI was found guilty, and was beheaded. On 1 February England went to war with France, on a Dutch issue: for Holland had a treaty claim on England. Holland, if she made her claim, did not choose to make it public. In 1793 men calling for parliamentary reform in Scotland were savagelv sentenced by Lord Justice Clerk Braxfield, whom even the Government thought a 'violent and intemperate great man’ in private. In 1794 the leaders of the London Corresponding Society were charged with treason, while Parliament suspended Habeas Corpus in one sitting. Thomas Erskine broke the charge by break¬ ing the evidence of the spies whom the Government had put into the Society. It was now plain how Pitt came by his fears; for spies have to make their stories seem worth the buying. Even Pitt’s friend Wilberforce found ‘his sanguine temper leading him to give credit to information which others might distrust’. His biog¬ rapher Charles Whibley is more lyrical. This sternly practical sense persuaded him also to reject no instrument that might prove useful to him. No Minister has ever employed spies on so vast a scale or to so good a purpose. The man who brought him valuable information never went empty away. He had learned from his father the power of knowledge, and he had improved upon the lesson. The year 1795 was a year of great dearth. There were huge bread riots; and George III, on his way to Parliament, was mobbed by a crowd shouting for peace. The Government answered with Bills, against Seditious Meetings, and against Treasonable Practices,

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which included anything which might ‘excite or stir up to hatred or contempt of the person of his Majesty’. It is hardly worth taking the endless list farther: to the Newspaper Act of 1798, to the Act of 1799 against Seditious Societies, and to the Combina¬ tion Laws of the same year. For in 1796 the French armies had become the armies of Napoleon Bonaparte. The French Revolu¬ tion had been defeated, by intervention from without, and by the moneyed middlemen within, whom Mary Wollstonecraft had seen and feared in Paris in 1793: If the aristocracy of birth is levelled with the ground, only to make room for that of riches, I am afraid that the morals of the people will not be much improved by the change, or the government rendered less venal. The second Terror, from the summer of 1793 to that of 1794, had done its work, within and without. England was not reminded that, throughout the French wars, there were probably fewer men executed in France than were hanged by law in England. Mean¬ while the Attorney General, Lord Eldon to be, had noted in 1795 of the Sedition Acts, that in the last two years there had been more prosecutions for libels than in any twenty years before.

FIVE Could The French Revolution of Blake have been called a sedi¬ tious libel? The first book tells the story of the revolution simply, but does not take it far. It does not even reach the fall of the Bastille. It is written plainly and with open sympathy, and it might have been widely read. Of course, The French Revolution, being meant for printing, is not as outspoken as are some verses which Blake wrote privately in his commonplace book about the same time. ‘Let the Brothels of Paris be opened ‘With many an alluring dance, ‘To awake the Physicians thro’ the city,’ Said the beautiful Queen of France.

THE SEDITIOUS WRITINGS

The King awoke on his couch of gold, As soon as he heard these tidings told: ‘Arise & come, both fife & drum, ‘And the [Famine] shall eat both crust & crumb/ [Then he swore a great & solemn Oath: ‘To kill the people I am loth, ‘But If they rebel, they must go to hell: ‘They shall have a Priest & a passing bell.’]

75

185

But in meaning and implication, The French Revolution does not differ from this. It would certainly have been thought wrong¬ headed by the frightened gentlemen of 1791; and it might have been thought dangerous. We cannot even be sure that, because the proof copy is dated 1791, it was ready to be printed before the Proclamation against Seditious Writings was made, on 21 May 1792. There are sentences which Blake put into the mouths of Louis XVI’s evil counsellors which would have sounded awkwardly when Louis XVI was taking just such advice, and when the Duke of Brunswick was marshalling his army. Thy Nobles have gather’d thy starry hosts round this rebellious city, To rouze up the ancient forests of Europe, with clarions of cloud breathing war, To hear the horse neigh to the drum and trumpet, and the trumpet and war shout reply. Stretch the hand that beckons the eagles of heaven; they cry over Paris, and wait Till Fayette point his finger to Versailles; the eagles of heaven must have their prey! 138 And England would no longer have welcomed the advice of the good counsellor, that a free people makes a free and secure gov¬ ernment. Is the body diseas’d when the members are healthful? can the man be bound in sorrow Whose ev’ry function is fill’d with its fiery desire? can the soul whose brain and heart Cast their rivers in equal tides thro’ the great Paradise, lan¬ guish because the feet,

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Hands, head, bosom, and parts of love follow their high breathing joy? And can Nobles be bound when the people are free, or God weep when his children are happy? Have you never seen Fayette’s forehead, or Mirabeau’s eyes, or the shoulders of Target, Or Bailly the strong foot of France, or Clermont the terrible voice? and your robes Still retain their own crimson: mine never yet faded, for fire delights in its form. But go, merciless man! enter into the infinite labyrinth of another’s brain Ere thou measure the circle that he shall run. Go, thou cold recluse, into the fires Of another’s high flaming rich bosom, and return unconsum’d, and write laws. If thou canst not do this, doubt thy theories; learn to consider all men as thy equals. Thy brethren, and not as thy foot or thy hand, unless thou first fearest to hurt them. 142 Blake is here writing out fully the dislike of Locke’s narrow ideal of equality before the law, which he had put into Tiriel and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: ‘One Law for the Lion & Ox is Oppression’. He is writing it in the very language of the two aphorisms of Lavater which were to him ‘true Christian philoso¬ phy far above all abstraction’. Blake held to this philosophy of fulfilment all his life. He wrote in Jerusalem, In Great Eternity every particular Form gives forth or Ema¬ nates Its own peculiar Light, & the Form is the Divine Vision And the Light is his Garment. This is Jerusalem in everv Man, A Tent & Tabernacle of Mutual Forgiveness, Male & Female Clothings. And Jerusalem is called Liberty among the Children of Albion. But Albion fell down. 684 And the philosophy has itself grown fuller. It has taken on an imagery apt to its time, of which The Marriage of Heaven and Hell gave glimpses: ‘Bring out number, weight & measure in a year of dearth’. But, precisely because of its social aptness, this

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Christian philosophy was no longer welcome as a philosophy of law. It is not out of place to read here a letter which a just judge, Lord Ellenborough, wrote to Wilberforce in 1802, about slavery. I have always felt a great abhorrence of the mode by which these unfortunate creatures are tom from their families and country, and have doubted whether any sound policy could grow out of a system which seemed to be so vicious in its foundation; but I am extremely alarmed at the consequence of disturbing it, particularly in the present convulsed state of the world. In short, my dear sir, I am almost ashamed to say that I tremble at giving their full effect to the impressions which the subject naturally makes on my mind, in the first view of it, as a man and a Christian. I am frightened at the consequences of any innovation upon a long-established prac¬ tice, at a period so full of dangers as the present. At the same time I cannot well reconcile it with the will of God. In such times a less scrupulous lawyer had little trouble in reading sedition in Christian philosophy. At a pinch, Lord Eldon could no doubt tell a jury just how, in the republic, the 'parts of love follow their high breathing joy’. The French Revolution was given up between setting and print¬ ing, because what it said had grown to be disliked in that time; and it may have grown to be thought seditious. Its suppression turned Blake back to the private manner which The French Revo¬ lution had been leaving. For The French Revolution was written to be read, and to be understood, by simple men. It was happy to have for symbols of its spiritual struggle the happenings of a real world. It is no less symbolical than the other prophetic books, earlier and later. But its manner is vivid and direct: round as the best of the later books, but simpler. But the dens shook and trembled: the prisoners look up and assay to shout; they listen, Then laugh in the dismal den, then are silent, and a light walks around the dark towers. 136 Swinburne was not unjust when he called this ‘mere wind and splutter’: although the judgement comes with odd authority from him. For it is what Blake called Jerusalem, speech ‘in the mouth

y8

WILLIAM BLAKE AND THE AGE OF REVOLUTION

of a true Orator rather than of a poet. But it is moving and understandable speech; and although Blake’s later speech is better as it grows more assured, it is not better for being vaguer, and it is not better for being aimless. Unlike the later books, The French Revolution seldom lingers in the rhetoric for the sake of the rhetoric. It is never loth to go on, as later books are, because there is really nothing very different to go to. It never wanders from the point, and it has a point. It has what Blake came most to lack, a forward aim and movement. The French Revolution lets us see how Blake’s manner might have grown, had Joseph Johnson printed the book a year earlier, and had it found the readers whom it might then have found. That it was not printed made it an unhappy turning point in Blake’s writing. For when Blake went on to etch Visions of the Daughters of Albion and America, in 1793, England was already at war with France, and the Terror was silencing all talk of the Revolution. Paine had gone to France, and Priestley was making ready to go to America, stripped of the hopes which had meant more to him than his researches: As the world advances in civilization, and national animosity abates, war becomes less distressing to peaceable individuals who do not bear arms. The wars of mercenaries were giving place to total war, and the peaceable individuals were being pressed into the militia. The Sedition Acts began to stand large over the written word. The pa¬ tient reader of Visions of the Daughters of Albion and America can still trace Blake’s hopes, symbolized in the sexual fulfilment of these woman nations. And the lesson is still plain. Why trembles honesty, and like a murderer Why seeks he refuge from the frowns of his immortal station? Must the generous tremble & leave his joy to the idle, to the pestilence, That mock him? who commanded this? what God? what Angel? To keep the gen’rous from experience till the ungenerous Are unrestrain’d performers of the energies of nature; Till pity is become a trade, and generosity a science That men get rich by; & the sandy desart is giv’n to the strong?

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What God is he writes laws of peace & clothes him in a tempest? What pitying Angel lusts for tears and fans himself with sighs? What crawling villain preaches abstinence & wraps himself In fat of lambs? no more I follow, no more obedience pay! 200 But Blake has already thought it well to use the symbolism of The Book of Thel in place of that of The French Revolution. And he has thought it well to speak his hopes not of the French Revolution but of the American revolt, which the Whigs had made respectable. Enslav’d, the Daughters of Albion weep; a trembling lamenta¬ tion Upon their mountains; in their valleys, sighs toward America. 189 Yet Blake is certainly thinking of France. Having already quoted the climax of A Song of Liberty, ‘Empire is no more! and now the Lion & Wolf shall cease’, he ends America in the very words of that song. While he was etching America, Blake cancelled a plate in which he had written of George III by name. Another year, and even the names which run through America, Washington, Franklin, and Paine, must be hidden in less revolutionary symbols of energy, Los and Ore. The horror of Europe, etched in 1794, is the horror of the war against the French Revolution. But it has taken on the smoky vagueness with which Blake was now clouding his thought. Put beside the conflicts of The French Revolution those of Europe, Thus was the howl thro’ Europe! For Ore rejoic’d to hear the howling shadows; But Palamabron shot his lightnings, trenching down his wide back; And Rintrah hung with all his legions in the nether deep: 242 the change is deliberate, a disguise. Blake is here calling the forces of the French Revolution Ore, and the forces against the Revolu¬ tion Rintrah and Palamabron the ‘horned priest’, who ‘tell the Human race that Woman’s love is Sin’. Blake chose to give these

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forces such forms, because his mind worked in large and shifting abstractions. But he chose now to call these forms Ore, Rintrah, and Palamabron, because he dared not call them Lafayette, Pitt, and George III. Yet these are the men within these symbols. For example, although the meaning of the symbols came to change, Rintrah with the Plow in Milton remains the Plowman whom The Spiritual Form of Pitt, Guiding Behemoth orders ‘to Plow up the Cities and Towers’. It is not easy to see that Blake is taking the French side in the war when he writes, But terrible Ore, when he beheld the morning in the east. Shot from the heights of Enitharmon, And in the vineyards of red France appear’d the light of his fury. The sun glow’d fiery red! The furious terrors flew around On golden chariots raging with red wheels dropping with blood! The Lions lash their wrathful tails! The Tigers couch upon the prey & suck the ruddy tide, And Enitharmon groans & cries in anguish and dismay. 245 Nevertheless, he is taking the French side: and he would have been foolhardy to condone the Terror more openly than this. When Blake etched Europe, the leaders of the London Corre¬ sponding Society were awaiting trial. The shadows of the censor and the spy lay across the page; and Blake knew it. The most outspoken lines of Europe fix the shadow of 1794. Every house a den, every man bound: the shadows are fill’d With spectres, and the windows wove over with curses of iron: Over the doors ‘Thou shalt not’, & over the chimneys ‘Fear’ is written: With bands of iron round their necks fasten’d into the walls The citizens, in leaden gyves the inhabitants of suburbs Walk heavy; soft and bent are the bones of villagers. 243

SIX At the beginning of the war against the French Revolution, Blake put into his notebook a Memorandum which has puzzled his readers.

THE SEDITIOUS WRITINGS

8l

I say I shan’t live five years, And if I live one it will be a Wonder June 1793 ^7 We do, however, know why, just five years later, Blake wrote on the back of the title-page of a religious book, To defend the Bible in this year 1798 would cost a man his life. 383 These words have a long history. In 1789 Richard Price had spoken before a dinner to toast the Glorious Whig Revolution of 1688; and had pointed the likeness to the French Revolution. In 1790 Edmund Burke attacked this speech in his Reflections on the Revolution in France, and broke with the Whigs; he later sent his son to France to rally those fighting against the Revolution. Tom Paine had answered Burke in The Rights of Man, and had got the hearing which he had sought since the American war. He used it to broadcast the rationalism which Blake had heard him argue at Joseph Johnson’s. Between 1793 and 1795, Paine printed the two parts of The Age of Reason, which argues not for atheism but for deism. The Government prosecuted his printers; and it prosecuted more than a hundred sellers of the book, for more than thirty years. But it also wanted to have Paine answered; and it wanted to have him answered as Price had been answered, not by a Tory but by a Whig. This is how Richard Watson came to write his Apology for the Bible in 1796, and how Blake came to read the book. By way of thanks, George III said that he ‘did not know the Bible needed an apology’. Richard Watson, like Paine, was now nearly sixty. He was of the stamp of the ample, happy, broad-minded pluralists who had flourished in the Whig age; but abler, more energetic, and less scrupulous. He had been in turn professor of chemistry and of divinity in the University of Cambridge. In order to qualify for the latter chair, he had been given an honorary doctorate of divinity, one day before the examination. The chair of chemistry had not needed even so formal a qualification. The dignity with which he wrote himself, on the title-page on which Blake was writing, R. Watson, D.D., F.R.S., was therefore not the dignity of labour. This, however, should be said for Watson’s energy, that he did think it his duty to learn something both of chemistry and of divinity, when he was professor of them. His kindly Whig

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divinity had earned him the names of the Levelling Prelate and the Bishop of the Dissenters. In 1780 he was writing with heat on behalf of the Whigs, against the Archbishop of York’s charge that they had led the Gordon riots. In 1782, when the Whigs held the Government, he took a bishopric. He notes that it was agreed that he should write pamphlets for the Government from time to time, if they should be needed. Even so, he could get only the miserable Bishopric of Llandaff. In 1792 he wrote a pamphlet to recant his liberal past, and to grieve at the French Revolution as Burke had done. William Wordsworth had already attacked this pamphlet in 1793. The notes which Blake now wrote on Watson’s Apology for the Bible speak the anger of the revolutionary against the renegade. I have not the Charity for the Bishop that he pretends to have for Paine. I believe him to be a State trickster. Dishonest Mis¬ representation. Priestly Impudence. Contemptible Falsehood & Detraction. Presumptuous Murderer. 384 The Beast & the Whore rule without control. 383 The Beast is the State, and the Whore is its Church. Blake took it for granted that Watson was writing for the Government and, whatever his title, was writing to uphold the war against the French Revolution. To what does the Bishop attribute the English Crusade against France? Is it not to State Religion? Blush for shame. 385 Against this conspiracy of State and ‘the Abomination that maketh desolate, i.e. State Religion’, Blake chose to uphold the deism of Paine, which he did not share. His choice was steadfast. The Perversions of Christ’s words & acts are attack’d by Paine & also the perversions of the Bible. Paine has not attacked Christianity. Watson has defended Antichrist. It appears to me Now that Tom Paine is a better Christian than the Bishop. Unlike Lord Ellenborough, Blake did not fear to be ‘a man and a Christian ; and therefore stood with Paine, with revolt, with the energy of Milton s Satan, and with Hell as the fire of energy.

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Blake’s testament of faith, where Watson asks ‘whether you have examined calmly’, is eloquent. Paine is either a Devil or an Inspired man. Men who give themselves to their Energetic Genius in the manner that Paine does are no Examiners. If they are not determinately wrong they must be Right or the Bible is false; as to Examiners in these points they will be spewed out. The Man who pretends to be a modest enquirer into the truth of a self evident thing is a Knave. The truth & certainty of Virtue and Honesty, i.e. Inspiration, needs no one to prove it; it is Evident as the Sun & Moon. He who stands doubting of what he intends, whether it is Virtuous or Vicious, knows not what Virtue means. No man can do a Vicious action & think it to be Virtuous. No man can take darkness for light. He may pretend to do so & may pretend to be a modest Enquirer, but he is a Knave. 386 Feeling so strongly, and seeing the sides so sharply, why did Blake not take his notes beyond the margin of the book, and print them where they could be seen? Blake has given us the answer himself, in a set of odd sentences which he wrote, in this order, among other notes on the back of Watson’s dignified titlepage. To defend the Bible in this year 1798 would cost a man his life. But to him who sees this mortal pilgrimage in the light that I see it, Duty to his country is the first consideration & safety the last. I have been commanded from Hell not to print this, as it is what our Enemies wish. 383 In face of Bishop Watson’s Heaven, Blake is, of course, quoting Hell as a giver of good advice. Its advice settles the to-and-fro of these three sentences of debate, and settles it against printing. Was the reason given with the advice, ‘as it is what our Enemies wish’, really just? Did the enemies of the Revolution really wish to provoke its friends to come into the open, as Lady Malmesbury had wished: As for Fox and Grey, I wish they would utter treason at once and be beheaded and hanged.

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There is a letter written by Pitt in this year, 1798, which shows that the Government could lay fairly long trains of provocation. There is a strong feeling among many of our friends that some decided notice must be taken of Fox’s speech. An idea has been suggested which I think deserves consideration. It is to begin with one of the measures we talked of, that of ordering him to attend. If he disavows, prosecuting the printer. If he avows, ordering him to be reprimanded, and then (which is the new part of the suggestion) if he offers a fresh insult at the next Whig Club, instead of gratifying him by an expulsion to send him to the Tower for the remainder of the session. This from the Prime Minister in a year of war, famine, and financial crisis, is leisurely and statesman-like. The Government was about to attack the London Corresponding Society afresh. Ironically, the Act which suppressed the Society next year stands in the Statute Book on one side, and the Combination Laws stand on the other side, of an Act to regulate the slave trade more humanely. Habeas Corpus was again suspended, and there were fresh attacks on the Press: ‘prosecuting the printer.’. This was the year in which the anonymity of the newspaper was ended. Yet what had Blake to fear, had he printed his notes openly over his own name? We can answer this question. Three wellknown men attacked Richard Watson’s renegade writings. One was William Wordsworth, in his Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff of 1793. Like Blake, Wordsworth charged Watson with con¬ spiring against the friends of the Revolution: Left to the quiet exercise of their own judgment, do you think that the people would have thought it necessary to set fire to the house of the philosophic Priestley? He charged Watson with perverting the pity which men had felt for the suffering people of France before the Revolution, by turn¬ ing that pity to her king and her priests. Like Blake, Wordsworth saw Watson ‘aim an arrow at liberty and philosophy, the eyes of the human race’. The second to attack Watson was Blake. The third was the scholar Gilbert Wakefield, who answered an Address By Watson in 1798 in his Reply to the Bishop of Llandaff. Neither Wordsworth nor Blake printed their attacks, and both remained

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free all their lives. Wakefield printed his, and was imprisoned for it from 1799 to 1801. And in this year 1798, Joseph Johnson him¬ self was at last trapped and imprisoned, precisely for selling a copy of Wakefield’s Reply to the Bishop of Llandaff to an agent provocateur. We may think Blake overwrought, and his fears a little mad. ‘To defend the Bible in this year 1798 would cost a man his life’ is an overstatement. But what grows striking, as we leam of the prosecutions of others, is how shrewdly Blake judged the temper of these years. The silences, the obscurities, the mumbling code names of the books which follow The French Revolution are those of a mystic with a harsh understanding of the world in which he was forced to live: in which he knew him¬ self to be a rebel, and in which he felt himself a prisoner.

SEVEN After The French Revolution Blake went back to the vague and mazy writing of Tiriel, because his world urged him there. But we must guard against the ready conclusions, that his world forced him there; that only the censor forced him there; and that the censor could have forced any man there. The censor never silenced Tom Paine, Gilbert Wakefield, and William Hone. Though the urge came from without, the caution and the secretiveness were within Blake, even in small matters: ‘I did not tell him so plain & wish you to keep it a secret & to burn this letter because it speaks so plain’. The mind which thought in the smoky symbols of Tiriel was ready to go back to such symbols. We can only give reasons for believing that it might not have gone back, had it not felt it to be safer to go back. Nor did Blake's mind turn back from fear alone; it also turned back, from helplessness. Blake had be¬ longed, as he said, to the Paine set. When he wrote The French Revolution the Paine set had known where were its sympathies and what were its hopes. But after 1792, when the Government began to break up the Paine set, its hopes were failing. And as the French crowd was drilled into the armies of Napoleon, its sympathies also wavered. There was a large shift of sympathy in England in 1797. It speaks for Blake’s staunchness that he went on hating ‘the English Crusade against France’ long after. But,

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like other radicals, he was already baffled and hopeless. This is the state of mind which shaped and fills the prophetic books; and it makes them more baffling than do their secret names. For this makes puzzles which were not set for the censor: puzzles to which Blake himself knew no answers. Though his graver never rested, it no longer hoped to reach an end. In Blake, Washington and Lafayette had of course always been symbolic figures, no more and no less personal than Los. Blake’s prophetic books had not been history even when they had used historical names. But history had once given their symbolism a direction and a hope; and now it had neither. It is not enough, therefore, to think of Blake’s prophetic books without Blake. And neither is it enough to think of them without Blake’s world. That world was wider than its censorship. But it was a world of censorship. It was the world of the acts against Seditious Writings, against Seditious Meetings, against Seditious Societies, against Treasonable Practices. It was the world of prose¬ cutions for blasphemy, and of the laws against cheap newspapers. It was the world of the Militia Bills and of the Combination Laws. It was Pitt’s world. That world did not make Blake; but it baffled him, and cowed him. Blake remained free all his life. But he was once tried for sedition.

THE SATANIC WHEELS

Machines

ONE In 1789 the novelist Fanny Burney, who later married an exiled French general, was Second Keeper of the Robes to the Queen. Speaking with Lord Mountmorres, she was shocked to hear him fear that revolutionary feeling would now come to England. Her friends Samuel Johnson and Edmund Burke had praised English law with such assurance that she could think of no cause for dis¬ content. ‘In what could be its pretence?’ she asked. Lord Mount¬ morres answered, ‘The game laws, and the tithes.’ It was the common view, and it long remained so. Distress grew, and discontent became frightening; plainly, those among whom they grew were poor; and to the ‘people thoroughly frightened’, Lord Grenville’s ‘body of landed gentlemen in this country’, the poor were village poor. Therefore country magistrates spent £2,000,000 in poor relief in 1792, more than £4,000,000 in 1802, more than £7,000,000 in 1813. Their relief did little to meet in¬ dustrial distress. The squires and the Commons had hardly heard of factory workers. The North Country men about Pitt knew better; and Pitt had begun to take measures in 1792, on the plea that A spirit had appeared in some of the manufacturing towns which made it necessary that troops should be kept near them. But Pitt had taken his measures first, and asked Parliament after. Only in 1799 did William Wilberforce press Parliament to turn a Bill, meant to control the workers in one trade, into the laws for¬ bidding all Combinations of workmen. 89

90

WILLIAM BLAKE AND THE AGE OF REVOLUTION

We cannot wonder that the growth of industry took so long to become common knowledge. The steps by which industry had moved from the village to the factory had been small, scattered, secret, in little-known techniques. They were steps by which in¬ dustry drew together; and they had taken it to places so far from London that even their names seemed outlandish. No Govern¬ ment had thought of taxing the new manufactures until 1784, when the Government tried to tax their raw stuffs. Since the in¬ dustrial towns had no seats in Parliament, the great Midland manufacturers had to lobby the Whig Opposition. These Midland dissenters who had grown up in their workshops, the potter Wedg¬ wood, the ironmaster Wilkinson, the engine-maker Boulton, held longest from Tory fears. After the Birmingham riot of 1791, they raised a subscription for Joseph Priestley. In 1794 the Marquis of Stafford warned Boulton 'that the country was upon the brink of a ruinous attempt to overthrow its Constitution’, by the London Corresponding Society. But Matthew Boulton felt that the country was rather safer than one of his engineers. The warning which he passed to his partner James Watt was, I hope to God our Southerns is out of the mess, & that none of his letters will be found amongst these papers, & I wish you would speak to him about it, for I have reasons for my fears & wish to guard him.

TWO The steps which took industry to its own revolution are now plainer. The village workmen could remain masters only so long as they could buy their raw stuffs. They could buy their raw stuffs only so long as they could sell their manufactures. When the price of manufactures slumped, the small masters had to borrow. And the price of manufactures often slumped: it slumped when¬ ever war narrowed the export market: and England was at war for more than half of the eighteenth century. The small masters borrowed raw stuffs, and became workers for a putting-out merchant. They borrowed on their tools, and came to rent them from an owning merchant. Before Blake was bom, most weavers,

THE SATANIC WHEELS

91

stocking-knitters, nailmakers, and others had already lost their small capital. Many had lost their tools, and were selling only their labour. The threshold to ownership was growing too high, even before the coming of the factory. The merchants and middlemen who had bought out these men had wanted to run industry: they had not set out to own it. But now that they had sunk capital in raw stuffs and tools, they could keep up profits on this capital only by using it fully. They must rationalize industry. The worker at home did not give the best return. He was careless with stuffs and tools which he did not own; he was idle when he had earned his keep; having little hope of becoming a master, he was thriftless. He was still suffered to stay at home, because there he had the help of his family. As soon as greater help was offered by drawing industry together, by breaking its processes into unskilled linked steps, and bv working its machines by power, he was moved to the factory. With these means Arkwright made his spinneries great, and Boulton his metal¬ works. The means of rationalization: the machine and the factory; the ring, the cartel, and the trust: these were not new. But in Blake’s lifetime they became the norms of industry; and Blake knew their purpose. Wheel without wheel, To perplex youth in their outgoings & to bind to labours in Albion Of day & night the myriads of eternity: that they may grind And polish brass & iron hour after hour, laborious task, Kept ignorant of its use: that they might spend the days of wisdom In sorrowful drudgery to obtain a scanty pittance of bread. 700 The industries best fitted to gain by factory methods were those making textiles. Of these, the woollen industry was heavily pro¬ tected; and rationalization was therefore pressed in the rival cotton industry. Both industries had unbounded markets in Europe, in America, and in Africa. In both, the skilled and well-paid weaver had outpaced the casual spinster, who spun only to eke out farm wages. For twenty-five years before Blake’s birth, weaving was being speeded up: for example, by the use of a mechanical shuttle.

92

WILLIAM BLAKE AND THE AGE OF REVOLUTION

at least in the cotton industry; and there had been a growing shortage of yam. Two inventions of the 1760s righted the balance. One was the many-spindled jenny of James Hargreaves, in which the spindles themselves stretched and twisted the thread which they were winding. The other was the frame patented by Richard Arkwright, which spun the thread as it were with mechanical fingers, by drawing it through rollers each pair of which turned faster than the pair before it. By 1779, Samuel Crompton had made an invention which in effect married these two together, in a mule which is largely the spinning machine of to-day. Arkwright had probably stolen his invention from the mechanic Thomas Highs; and it had been made by others before Highs, about 1736. But Arkwright turned this and kindred inventions into real power machines; he organized the machines in factories; and he did what the mechanics did not know how to do, he made the factories pay. Hitherto, English cotton cloths had had linen warps; and Parliament had protected these fustians against the pure cotton cloths of India, by forbidding the use of all pure cotton cloths. It was Arkwright’s gift, not merely to spin a cotton thread strong enough to make warps, but to get Parliament to withdraw its laws against it. He got bankers and hosiers to back him; he bought his way into rival firms; when his patents were overthrown, he beat down his rivals without them. Vigorous, am¬ bitious, ruthless, self-made, and with no past knowledge of his industry, he was the model of the new captains of the textile industry.

THREE Like the woollen and the cotton industries, the English iron in¬ dustry had long been held back by the shortage of one of its raw stuffs: charcoal to smelt and fine the plentiful iron ore. Once the Surrey ironmasters, who had enraged Queen Elizabeth by selling cannon to Navy and pirates alike, had made their charcoal in the oak scrub there. The Surrey hills glow like the clinkers of the furnace; Lam¬ beth’s Vale

THE SATANIC WHEELS

93

Where Jerusalem’s foundations began, where they were laid in ruins, Where they were laid in ruins from every Nation, & Oak Groves rooted. Dark gleams before the Fumace-mouth a heap of burning ashes. 485 Since then, the furnaces had moved west and north in search of charcoal. But charcoal probably remained scarce, and was cer¬ tainly dear and awkward in use: for it is so easily crushed that iron ore could be smelted with it only a little at a time. In 1749 pig iron was so scarce that it had to be imported from America, in spite of the petition of the tanners of Sheffield and elsewhere. If the Bill should pass the English iron would be undersold; consequently a great number of furnaces and forges would be discontinued; in that case the woods used for fuel would stand uncut, and the tanners be deprived of oak bark sufficient for the continuation of their occupation. A stronger and more plentiful stuff was needed to smelt iron ore. The stuff was coke, that is coal from which have been burnt off some of the impurities which make iron brittle and unworkable. It is not easy to use coke in smelting, for it must be done in a large furnace and with a strong blast. The process was tried by William Wood in 1726, after Swift had driven his halfpence out of Ireland. Swedenborg, then an expert in mining and metals, reported its failure. But the process had in fact been worked secretly since about 1709 by a family of Shropshire ironmasters, the Darbys. It had since been leamt by a neighbouring family, the Wilkinsons. Iron cast straight from the blast furnace began to take over many of the uses of fined wrought iron. It began to make new uses for itself, for example in the founding of engines. By 1762 the Darbys and the Wilkinsons were forming a ring to charge the same prices for their castings. The Darbys were already a vertical trust, feeding their furnaces from their own coal- and iron-mines. Ways were found by 1784 of stirring and rolling the dross out of iron also fined with coke, so that it could be wrought. But the stuff of the Industrial Revolution remained cast iron, the pride of John Wilkinson. By the 1790s, Matthew Boulton was minting Wilkinson’s wage tokens.

94

WILLIAM BLAKE AND THE AGE OF REVOLUTION

and they were good coin in every Shropshire iron town. The iron¬ masters were masters of the West Country. It is pleasant to know that the artless tanners were also saved. In 1765, the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce gave a prize of £100 to a poor country tanner, who had discovered how to tan with oak sawdust in place of bark.

FOUR The two great industries of the Industrial Revolution, cotton and iron, and the many lesser industries, Birmingham chemicals and knick-knacks, Sheffield tools, Staffordshire china, shared two needs. They needed transport. This need was met by building, in the first thirty-five years of Blake’s life, a network of better roads and new canals. And they needed coal, for their own use and for the use of their town-dwelling workmen, who could no longer cut fuel on the common. To meet this growing need, the coalminer had to work deeper seams. There, he had to face greater risks of falls and of gas. The Newcastle papers were hushing up pit explosions when Blake was still a child. And he had now always to face water. Before Elizabethan times, miners in Europe had learnt that no suction pump will raise water much more than thirty feet, however powerful it is made. When Blake was born, most coal- and metalmines were already working at depths of two hundred feet and more. They had therefore to be kept dry by sets of pumps working one above the other. Such a set of pumps needed an engine to work it; and the steam engines were invented, either as mining pumps themselves or to work mining pumps in this way. For most of the eighteenth century the mines used the engine of Thomas New¬ comen, a West Country smith and engineer. In this engine the piston was raised by steam, and fell back into the vacuum made when a jet of water condensed the steam; its rise and fall worked the pump rods. Using steam only just above air pressure, the en¬ gine was little more than a suction engine; and was plainly modelled on the suction pump. But it worked, so long as the rush of water was not great. And unlike an earlier engine by Thomas Savery modelled on the force pump, and unlike many force pumps, it did not regularly blow itself to pieces.

THE SATANIC WHEELS

95

Newcomen’s engine was used in coal-mines, because the coal which it used cost nothing there. But it was hopelessly wasteful elsewhere, because the cylinder was chilled at each stroke, and much of the steam on the next stroke went to reheat it. When Boulton made the round of the Cornish copper-mines about 1775, he found that of the forty engines there 'there are only eighteen of ’em in work on account of ye high price of coal’. Boulton had then just begun an engine business with the instrument-maker James Watt, who had been at work since 1763 to remake the engine with a con¬ densing chamber away from the cylinder. In this partnership Watt went on to drive the piston down by steam, as well as up; and to make it turn a factory wheel, in place of lifting a pump rod. The story of Watt’s engine is commonplace; but behind it stand two forces of the Industrial Revolution which are less well known. First, Watt made his engine work only under the press of precise needs. He had been toying with it for years, before he faced the tasks of making it in John Roebuck’s coal-mines. Roebuck was feeding his great Carron ironworks from these mines, and his Newcomen engine bad been overwhelmed by flooding. When Roebuck went bankrupt in the slump of 1772, Watt’s new partner Boulton found for market the water-logged mines of Cornwall, where coal .was so dear that they based the rent for their engine on its coal saving. Boulton and Watt even took shares in these mines in order to keep them open; and in 1785 Boulton and Josiah Wedgwood formed a Cornish copper cartel, to pool the market with the Anglesey surface mines. And Boulton in 1781 turned Watt to the new needs of the factories, then looking for a means to replace their feeble and uncertain water power. There is no other Cornwall to be found, and the most likely line for increasing the consumption of our engines is the appli¬ cation of them to mills which is certainly an extensive field. The people in London, Manchester and Birmingham are steam mill mad. I don’t mean to hurry you, but I think that in the course of a month or two we should determine to take out a patent for certain methods of producing rotative motion. xt was in making tnese engines to turn a factory wheel that Watt fixed the horse-power in 1782, and Blake protested—

96

WILLIAM BLAKE AND THE AGE OF REVOLUTION

The Villages Lament: they faint, outstretch’d upon the plain. Wailing runs round the Valleys from the Mill & from the Bam. The Horse is of more value than the Man.

275

To prove the worth of their engine to the manufacturers ‘steam mill mad’, Boulton and Watt put it into the Albion flour mill in 1786. The grinding gear was John Rennie’s first work in London. The Al¬ bion mill became a showplace, counted among the sights of London, until it was burned in 1791. This is how it came to be linked with the sorrows of Albion in Blake’s mind. The living & the dead shall be ground in our rumbling Mills For bread of the Sons of Albion. 673 Second, Watt could not save Roebuck, because the Scottish smiths could not make engine parts with the precision needed to make his engine work. And Watt took Boulton for partner because only in Boulton’s workshops had he seen this precision. The engine could hardly have worked then, had not John Wilkinson just in¬ vented a way of boring cylinders true. Watt's thoughts became engines in the hands of self-taught mechanics such as William Murdock, self-reliant, inventive, and precise. Their workmanship then made the high-pressure engine of the Cornish engineer Richard Trevithick, about 1800. The Industrial Revolution moved by the skill of its mechanics. It moved from what the engineer asked to what the mechanic could make, from what the mechanic made to what the engineer might plan. Its horror was that the mechanic’s skill commonly threw him out of work.

FIVE In 1793 one of Arkwright’s more humane partners finished the building of a new spinning-mill. He kept one of the mechanics who had built it, as an odd-job man at 12s. a week. There was no other place for a man in the mill. There were places for the odd-job man’s wife and four children: they earned the greater part of the family’s wage, another 15s. a week.

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^ *98 Place, Francis, 197 Plato, 184, 187-8 Plowman, Dorothy, 200 Ponsonby, Henry, 197 Pope, /dexander, 8-9, 48-9, 63-4, 151, 187-8, 196-7 Price, Richard, 66, 81, 102, 108, 144, 183, 201 Priestley, Joseph, 10, 13, 66, 71, 78, 84, 90, 108, 142-4, 147, 179-80, 195-6, 200—1 Prior, Matthew, 9 Pythagoras, 145, 175 Raine, Kathleen, 17, 202 Ramsden, Jesse, 141 Ray, John, 137 Rennie, John, 96, 140 Reynolds, Joshua, 22-3 Richmond, Charles Lennox, third Duke, 60-1, 107—8 Robinson, Eric, 201 Robinson, Henry Crabb, 196, 202 Roebuck, John, 95-6, 142 Romily, Anne, 200 Roscoe, William, 150 Rose, George, 104, 198 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 160 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 6, 114, 143, 147, 158, 168, 170 Rowley, Thomas (Thomas Chatterton), 24

Rubens, Peter Paul, 25 Rud6, George, 197 Ryland, William Wynne, 27-8, 50 Sampson, John, 17, 202 Saurat, Denis, 17 Savage, Richard, 51 Savery, Thomas, 94 Schofield, Robert E., 201 Scholfield, John, 107, 111-13, *99 Schorer, Mark, 17 Scott, John, of Amwell, 57, 197 Scott, Walter, 35, 174 Shakespeare, William, 31 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 130, 145, 147, 188 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 65, 105 Sidney, Philip, 182 Small, William, 142 Smith, Adam, 6, 49, 99-101, 128, 143> l85> i97> j99 Smith, David Nichbl, 200 Southcott, Joanna, 166-7 Southern, John, 90 Southey, Robert, 114, 174 Stafford, Granville Leveson-Gower, first Marquis, 90 Stalin, Joseph Vissarionovitch, 14 Stephen, Leslie, 195 Sterne, Laurence, 140 Stothard, Thomas, 21-2 Stuart, Charles Edward, the Young Pretender, 53 Swedenborg, Emanuel, 11, 32, 63, 66-7, 93, 121, 129, 144, 155 Swift, Jonathan, 9, 48, 93, 105, 147, 187-8, 196, 199 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 16-17, 38> 77» 196 Tawney, R. H., 144, 202 Telford, John, 202 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 4 Thomson, James, 57 Thomton, Robert John, 115-16, 140 Tillvard, E. M. W., 202 Todd, Ruthven, 16, 196 Tofts, Mary, of Godaiming, 142 Treloar, W. P., 196

INDEX

207

Trevithick, Richard, 96, 140 Truchsess, Joseph, Count, 24 Turberville, A. S., 197 Unwin, George, 198 Varley, John, 27 Victoria, Queen, 53, 197 Voltaire (Frangois Marie 114, 143, 168, 170

Arouet),

Wainewright, Thomas Griffiths, 28, 5° Wakefield, Gilbert, 84-5, 144 Walpole, Horace, 23, 152 Walpole, Robert, 47, 187 Washington, George, 8, 56, 79, 86 Watson, Richard, Bishop of Llandaff, 32, 81-5, 201 Watt, James, 90, 94-6, 140-2, 198 Watts, Isaac, 130, 153 Weber, Max, 202 Wedgwood, Josiah, and family, 22, 26, 46, 90, 95, 126, 142 Wesley, Charles, 153 Wesley, John, 10, 66, 128, 145-7, 149-50, 152-4, 164-5, 202 Whibley, Charles, 73, 198

Whitbread, Samuel, 65, 101, 105, 128, 149 Whitefield, George, 128, 145 Wilberforce, A. M., 198 Wilberforce, William, 35-6, 70, 73, 77, 89, 101, 103-4, 124> *49- 198200 Wild, Jonathan, 52 Wilkes, John, 10, 23, 54, 59-61, 195 Wilkinson, John, 46, 90, 93, 96, 102, 140, 142 Willey, Basil, 201 William III, 47-9, 63-4 Wilson, Mona, 16, 196, 199 Winstanley, Gerrard, 12 Wolf, A., 201 Wollstonecraft, Mary (Mrs. God¬ win), 71, 74, 108, 150, 198 Wood, Anthony, 195 Wood, William, 93 Woolf, Leonard, 197 Wordsworth, Dorothy, 35 Wordsworth, William, 6, 9, 35, 82, 84, 114, 147, 154, 174, 201 Wren, Christopher, 9 Young, Edward, 9, 21, 47, 125, 151, 196

I

THE AUTHOR Jacob Bronowski is a Senior Fellow of The Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego, California, and an HonoraryFellow of Jesus College, Cambridge. A mathematician by training, he is also well known for his work in the fields of litera¬ ture, intellectual history and the philos¬ ophy of science. He is the author of numerous books, including another work of literary criticism. The Poet's Defence; his other publications include Science and Human

Values,

The

Common

Sense

of

Science and (with Bruce Mazlich) The Western Intellectual Tradition.

ISBN o 7100 7277 5 Printed in Great Britain

POEMS OF WILLIAM BLAKE Edited by W. B. Yeats A reprint of the selection made by W. B. Yeats of Blake’s poetry and prose, first published in 1905. It is a landmark in literary history. It marks the recognition of a neglected, misunderstood genius by another great poet, who has given here what is probably the best small selection of Blake’s poetry in existence, together with an important introductory essay and notes.

BLAKE AND TRADITION Kathleen Raine In two volumes ‘This is a beautifully-produced book with almost two hundred illustra¬ tions, the whole attractively printed with a spaciousness that is seldom found nowadays. It is a book no Blake scholar can afford to ignore, a major contribution to Blake studies by any criterion. Much of its value lies in its being, not only a work of scholarship, but also a deeply-felt work, whose content means more to the author on account of its intrinsic value than its acceptance as a literary authority. It is a great pity that such books are so rare.’ —W. H. STEVENSON, Essays in Criticism

ROUTLEDGE & KEGAN PAUL